Israeli government accused of complicity as settlers demolish Jericho homes

Jericho, occupied West Bank – Where Palestinian homes once stood among orchards and swimming pools on the southwestern edge of Jericho, there is now only flattened earth.

Somewhere beneath the packed dirt lie entire houses, dumped into pits and smoothed over. Only a few severed water pipes hint that anyone ever lived here – that, and the piles of rubble yet to be buried by an Israeli settler’s excavator.

“Why do you hide the crime you’re committing?” asked Khalil al-Razim, 60, a Jerusalemite who has spent his summers on a plot of land here in the area of Ein al-Duyuk for more than a decade.

Beside al-Razim’s house, a pile of rubble more than two metres high blocks the entrance to the home of his neighbour, Mohammad Salah. Next to the pile, Salah stood with one of his four children. He now climbs his own fence to reach his house.

Six months earlier in February, during the first settler attack to tear through the area – with homes demolished and damaged, and residents attacked and robbed – a settler arrived with a bulldozer and began demolishing fences and houses in the neighbourhood, including parts of Salah’s home. This summer, the same work resumed under the guise of “clearing” the ruins those earlier attacks had left behind – and in the process, the Israeli excavator dumped piles of rubble in front of Salah’s home.

“How am I supposed to get into my own house?” Salah recalled asking the settler.

“That’s not my problem, how you get into your house,” the man told him, according to Salah. “Can’t get into your house? Go around another way from here. This land is not coming back to you.”

Since July 19, settler-operated excavators have kept coming on a near-daily basis – for the supposed purpose of “clearing waste”, but doing far more than that. The settler behind the attacks, identified by locals and in legal filings from the Israeli state as Hanan Herbst, is escorted by soldiers on every visit. No order has ever been shown to residents – no paper a lawyer can hold up in court. “Not an official order,” Salah said. “It’s all thuggery. Just brute force, nothing else.”

What is unfolding here, according to residents, lawyers and the state’s own court filings, is a subversion of normal legal processes that have all but erased the line between settler ambition and state authority. In practice, Israeli authorities have given the settlers close to a free hand over an entire Palestinian neighbourhood.

“This is a state with no law,” Salah said. “No decency in it. A state of thugs.”

Al Jazeera reached out to Israeli authorities for comment, but received no response. Herbst was also reached by phone, but hung up after being told he was being contacted by Al Jazeera. He has not responded to further attempts at contact.

A minister and a pogrom

Herbst owns an Israeli settler outpost called Armonot Farm, built without authorisation on a ridge overlooking Ein al-Duyuk in the summer of 2024. It was initially illegal even under Israel’s own rules, but the Israeli cabinet formally recognised it as a settlement, under the name Daya, at the end of March.

The neighbourhood below, known locally as Stih, sits a few dozen metres from the ruins of the Hasmonean and Herodian winter palaces, an archaeological site Israel’s government has designated a flagship for a planned network of “Judeo-centric” heritage parks across the West Bank. On the morning of February 10, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu posted a video of himself at the ruins, Israeli flag in hand. “Any place built on the heritage of the Jewish people,” he said, “we will destroy it.”

Within hours of the post, Palestinian residents said, dozens of masked settlers descended on the area from the Armonot settlement and other outposts in what activists and residents call an eight-hour “pogrom”. Two Palestinian communities sit side by side here, and both were hit that day: a group of Bedouins closest to the ruins, home to roughly a hundred people from the Kaabneh tribe, and the neighbourhood of mostly villa-style homes belonging to Palestinian families from elsewhere, including Salah’s and al-Razim’s.

Ali Kaabneh, 40, a Bedouin herder, was inside his house when the February 10 attack began.

“They started throwing stones at me,” he said. “They forced me and my wife out of the house. There were 13 families with me – they drove us out with stones and weapons. It was a threat: I’m going to die if I don’t get out.”

When the settlers withdrew roughly eight hours later, Kaabneh’s 150 sheep had scattered, and his licensed tractor was gone, driven up towards the settlement. Thirteen houses in the Bedouin compound were demolished that day, he said. In the neighbouring community, three homes were destroyed completely, according to Hussein Taha, a longtime resident.

Many of the Bedouin families have lived since then in the ruins of their partially destroyed homes, or without shelter at all, according to Kaabneh.

‘Clearing waste’

For months afterwards, “there was a kind of calm”, Taha said, during which settlers nonetheless carried out thefts of people’s properties and uprooted trees. “But whoever wanted to fix his wall, [Herbst] would come to him and stop him.”

But behind the scenes, developments continued. In March, the Israeli military issued a seizure order for a strip of Palestinian land for an access route to the archaeological site – an order not handed to affected residents until weeks after it was issued – part of a sharp increase in such orders that Israeli NGOs Emek Shaveh and Kerem Navot say now overwhelmingly serve settler rather than security interests.

That “calm” ended on July 19, at 8:30am, when Herbst arrived with a bulldozer – ostensibly to bury rubble from February’s attack, but soon damaging and destroying property well beyond it. The walls of four homes were destroyed or damaged in the first day alone, according to Taha. When residents and Israeli solidarity activists reached out to police, the military, the Palestinian District Coordination and Liaison Office (DCO) and the Civil Administration that day, they were told no one knew anything about it.

By afternoon, the official line had shifted, according to Yael Sela, a cofounder of the Palestine Solidarity co-op that has maintained a presence in the community since February: an unnamed “high-ranking” military figure, she was told, had authorised the work – to “clear waste”.

In the weeks since, residents and activists say, the bulldozers have demolished or damaged additional houses, alleys, orchards and gardens, and dug pits to bury the debris inside the residential area. Soldiers escort Herbst and keep activists back, citing an ambiguous “closed zone”; no official order has been produced for locals, though activists attempting to enter and document the site have been arrested.

Lawyer Tawfiq Jabareen filed for an emergency injunction at Israel’s High Court on July 23, then again, urgently, on July 29, when the demolitions intensified rather than stopped.

What came back, on the night of July 30, was the state’s own account of how Herbst came to be there – a filing, which Al Jazeera obtained, that revealed an extraordinary example of the state deputising settlers to carry out demolitions and land takeover.

The filing revealed that a state-backed arrangement granting Israeli settlers agricultural use of the land long predated February’s settler attack. According to the state’s account, a March 2025 agreement was reached between Herbst and the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization to cultivate “state land” for agriculture.

Following February’s mass settler attack that demolished the Palestinian homes in the area, in May, the Binyamin Regional Council asked the Civil Administration to let Herbst clear “building waste” from “previous demolitions”, without specifying that those demolitions were the settlers’ own making. Nonetheless, the Civil Administration approved the request. The Jordan Valley Brigade commander, Colonel Gilad Shriki, then approved a military escort for Herbst.

At least some of the Palestinian homes in the area have been under a longstanding Israeli court injunction protecting them from demolitions. The agreement instructed Herbst not to damage structures or trees and to stay within the allocated area – instructions that, residents and activists say, have been violated at every turn, under military escort.

“The settler has demolished, and continues to demolish, buildings and uproot trees, despite the existence of restraining orders from the court in Jerusalem barring the army from demolishing them,” said Jabareen, who filed his petition against the army, the settler and the state prosecution together. “That is: the army circumvented the court’s decision and sent the settler to do the demolishing instead.”

“The Prosecution claims the [Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization] leased the land to the settler,” he said, “even though the Civil Administration itself had barred the settler from demolishing any building or any tree.”

“My analysis,” Jabareen said, “is that the army and the Civil Administration are now in the settlers’ grip, and there’s no longer any real difference between them.

“The law and court rulings mean nothing to them. They believe imposing facts on the ground is stronger than any court decision.”

‘Why can’t I go back to my home?’

Across the razed land, what remains standing is small strips of common-area vegetation belonging to no one in particular. The state’s initial response suggests Herbst plans to begin cultivating the razed land as early as this week. The state maintains the ground itself is state land, now allocated to Herbst for agricultural use – though, as Sela noted, no map or boundary of that allocation has ever been produced.

“The purpose of this act of destruction was to terrorise the Bedouin community, and to create the impression that this was an empty area with nobody living there – only piles of demolished concrete,” said Hussein Taha. “Then this ‘kind settler’ wants to come and ‘clean up’ the area, cultivate it, and benefit from it, because he supposedly loves agriculture and green gardens.”

For al-Razim, whose family bought land here more than a decade ago, what is happening feels familiar. He is from Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem, where settlers have spent decades pushing Palestinian families out through a legal system that, he says, offers no real recourse. His own son’s rented home in Silwan was demolished by authorities. Due to the traditional system of ownership in the area, Palestinian-held land often remains undivided family inheritance, unregistrable under rules that demand proof no family can produce.

“They know there’s no tabu [land deed] for it,” al-Razim said. “But [they tell us to] bring proof. So they exploit that gap.”

Unable to safely reach their home and fearing settler attacks, Salah has moved his wife and four children into a rented apartment in Bethlehem, for 2,000 shekels ($667) a month, though he is unable to find work there. He goes back to what used to be his house, mostly alone, when he can.

“Any time I bring it up with my wife, she breaks down,” said Salah outside his blocked home. “She says to me, ‘We want to go back to our home.’ My kids say to me, ‘Why can’t we go back to our home?’ I don’t know what to say to them.”

Attempts to reason with the settlers have failed. “These settlers don’t try to speak with you,” he added. “They only speak in the language of power.”

He paused. “I feel like I’m weak,” he said. “In front of my son, I’m weak – I can’t protect him, I can’t get him back to his home. There’s no worse feeling than standing in front of your kids and your wife and not being able to protect your home.”

Salah glanced at his son accompanying him that day. “I always told my kids: If you don’t make trouble, nobody will bother you. If you don’t cause problems, the government won’t come after you. And my son says to me, ‘Dad, you’re a liar. Look – we don’t make trouble. And yet they came and destroyed our house.’”

He gestured at the razed land adjacent to their home, on the other side of the rubble. He looked up towards the hillside above – Herbst’s excavator visible on the slope of the now-legalised settlement.

“What am I supposed to say to him?”