ON JANUARY 27 at 11.30pm, about 150 soldiers and over 20 military vehicles arrived in Madama, an agricultural village with a population of around 2,300, located south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, and remained there for eight hours.

The village is subjected to frequent military raids – often very violent — and closures of access, although not on this scale.

Karim, a friend from the village which I have visited on many occasions, told me the soldiers vandalised a house and a car and raided over 40 homes, detaining 43 men.

On that cold night, the men were taken in their night clothes, blindfolded and with wrists bound tightly together to a room in a disused building between Madama and the neighbouring village of Burin.  

Later, another 42 detainees, including an 11-year-old boy, arrived from Burin, which was suffering a similar raid. During the interrogations that followed, many of the detainees were beaten around the head, chest and other parts of their bodies, subsequently needing hospital treatment.  

Finally, they were freed except a disabled man from Madama and two detainees from Burin.

When the army departed early the following morning, the villagers in Burin were relieved that Israeli troops were no longer firing tear gas and bullets in the village centre, while in Madama they were relieved that on this occasion at least, the soldiers had abstained from firing weapons and that more homes and property had not been vandalised and no-one killed.

Their relief was justifiable as UN statistics reveal that since the Hamas attack in Israel in October 2023, over 1,052 Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem (one in five of them children) have been killed by the Israeli army and illegal Jewish settlers. During 2025 alone, soldiers had killed 225 Palestinians, including 55 children.

Indeed, on January 23, Israeli soldiers had killed 59-year-old Madama farmer Jibril Ahmed Qatt Jaber. The Israeli army had bulldozed Jibril’s land a few months previously and he was tending to the soil, possibly to prepare for spring planting, when soldiers shot him and he fell, bleeding.  

An ambulance arrived which the army prevented from approaching Jibril who then bled to death – a common occurrence after army shootings. The soldiers have withheld Jibril’s body.  

During a raid four days later, the army commander warned the detained villagers not to attend Jibril’s funeral when his body was released.  

The Israeli soldiers returned to Madama on January 30 at 10pm to raid another house where they stayed for about three hours, but without arresting anyone.

On February 6 two raids at 3pm and 11pm saw soldiers shooting live rounds and using tear gas to affirm their domination, but without raiding houses or detaining residents.

The same night as the large raids on Madama and Burin, Israeli forces raided Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps and town, Nur Shams and Al-Fawwar refugee camps and eight villages and cities.  

The next day, they raided part of Hebron and 12 further villages. Israeli troops have particularly targeted Palestinian refugee camps. By June 2025, 40,000 Palestinians in Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps became refugees for a second time after Israeli troops entered the camps and drove them out of their homes, before demolishing many of them.

The more than 700,000 illegal Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank – many of whom form part of army units – also carry out raids and attacks.

Madama and Burin are overlooked by three violent Israeli settlements, Yitzhar, Har Bracha and Givat Ronen, which are expanding down the hillside towards the villages in the valley.  

Israeli settlers throughout the occupied West Bank are intent on driving Palestinian residents off their lands and out of their villages to claim these lands for themselves.  

Backed by the Israeli government, they carry guns and attack, seize, occupy, vandalise and destroy Palestinian homes and lands and physically attack, sometimes murder, Palestinian farmers or their families with complete impunity.  

Israeli soldiers shield them by throwing tear gas grenades, and by beating and arresting Palestinian farmers and village people who come to protect their families and their land.  

The green hills filled with olive groves that I first saw in 2011 during the olive harvest, now contain large areas of the black skeletons of burnt trees, following years of settler arson attacks. Terraces lie bare on the stony ground and Portakabins of new settler outposts occupy patches of fallow ground.

The area of Masafer Yatta, in the South Hebron Hills, home to over 19 Palestinian Bedouin agricultural and herding communities, suffers extreme settler violence as settlements increase in number and size.  

The settlers rampage setting fire to homes, stealing animals and attacking the residents.  

Typically, on the evening of January 27 settlers, with the backing of the army carried out pogroms on three villages simultaneously: after setting fires to Al-Fakheit, Al-Tuban, and Al-Halawa, they blocked firefighters from reaching the flames.  

A report from Israeli human rights volunteers mentions 49-year-old Mohammad Abu Sabha from Al-Fakheit whom Israeli activists had found lying on the ground, bleeding, vomiting, and unconscious.  

According to his relatives, Mohammad had been preparing to rush to the aid of residents of Al-Halawa who had already come under attack, when a group of masked settlers armed with clubs ambushed and assaulted him near his house. After he fell to the ground, the settlers turned on his family, striking his 16-year-old daughter, Naghm, on the hand before she managed to escape inside the house.

Settlers struck Mohammed’s elderly mother, Duha, on the head, broke her arm, and fractured one of her ribs. Before leaving, they shattered the window of the room where the family had taken shelter, sprayed tear gas inside, and smashed the glass of the family’s car.

Mohammad remained bleeding on the ground for about an hour before an ambulance was allowed access to take him and his mother to hospital.                                                

In 1967, before the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Palestinian population in the fertile Jordan Valley was around 275,000, mostly dedicated to agriculture and herding. Today it has reduced to about 60,000 as Israeli settlement agribusinesses with state, legal and military support, take exclusive control of water sources and aggressively seize lands, on which Palestinian agricultural communities once prospered.

Ethnic cleansing by settlers takes place throughout occupied Palestine.

In occupied East Jerusalem, in the districts of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, settler organisations like Ateret Cohanim, enact law suits to dispossess Palestinian families of their homes.  

In Silwan in 2025 alone, 360 structures (almost half being residential) were demolished, with two more Palestinian families dispossessed on January 26 this year. Another 24 families (roughly 130 people) are now under imminent threat of displacement after the Israeli Supreme Court rejected their requests to appeal.

In Sheikh Jarrah, the Jerusalem Municipality is establishing a Jewish settlement of about 340 housing units in the heart of the neighbourhood, entailing the demolition of nearly 40 Palestinian residential buildings and the forcible displacement of dozens of families.  

Settler lawsuits are based on the 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters Law whereby Jews who owned property in East Jerusalem and lost it in 1948 can receive it back (despite receiving alternative homes from the state). Conversely, the 1950 Absentees’ Properties Law states that Palestinians who lost their property in Israel in 1948 are not entitled to recover it, thus disregarding the Fourth Geneva Convention, and United Nations Resolutions enshrining the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their original homes — Resolutions 194 (1949) and 3236 (1974).    

The very existence of Israeli settlements in occupied territory contravenes the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory, as well as UN security council Resolutions 446 (1979) and 2334 (2016).  

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice confirmed the illegality of Israeli settlements. Notwithstanding, in 2025, the Israeli government approved 41 new illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. This year laws are being introduced to enable settlers to seize land more easily to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.    

The suffering, murder, maiming and torture of Gazans and apocalyptic erasure of the occupied strip’s homes, culture and infrastructure have been widely reported and underly the stated aim of Netanyahu, his ministers and many members of the Knesset to expel all Palestinians from Gaza, which poll results reveal are in keeping with the beliefs of 82 per cent of Israelis.

Even Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, are not safe from ethnic cleansing.  

In the Naqab (Negev) desert, over 35 villages, home to approximately 90,000 Bedouins who are Israeli citizens, are denied access to essential services, such as water, electricity, sewage systems and emergency services.  

Most of these villages such as Al-Araqeeb, have existed since before 1948, some for centuries. Residents suffer forced evictions and house demolitions so that Jewish Israelis can occupy the area.  

In 2025, the Israelis demolished over 85 homes in the village of Al-Sir, home to 1,500 inhabitants, and set others on fire.

More ethnic cleansing has taken place in Palestinian villages in the Galilee and in “mixed cities,” such as Ramle and Jaffa. The intention to ethnically cleanse non-Jews has always been a central tenet of zionism.

Theodore Herzl, the founder of the zionist movement produced the pamphlet Der Judenstaat, 1896, promoting the creation of a future independent, uniquely Jewish state. In a diary entry from 1895, he expressed the need “to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country.”  

In 1937, in a letter to his son, the zionist leader David Ben Gurion wrote: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as war.”

Between 1940 and 1947, the zionist leadership compiled maps and lists of Palestinian villages and urban areas, later known as Plan Dalet, forming the basis of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the violence preceding and following Israeli independence in 1948 (the Nakba).  

The zionist army carried out raids on Palestine areas which, through killings, bombardments, arson, home demolitions, intimidation and forced evictions resulted in over 750,000 Palestinians – half the population – being driven out of their country.  

Many refugees went to live in camps in what is today the occupied West Bank, at the time part of Jordan, and Gaza, part of Egypt. It is these camps that Israeli troops currently are destroying and occupying.

On July 19 2018, the Israeli Knesset (parliament), headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, passed the Nation State Law – a constitutional law, described in Israel as a “Basic Law.”  

After affirming “the State of Israel is the home of the Jewish people,” this law states unequivocally that “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” It continues: “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation” with Jerusalem, “complete and united,” as the capital of Israel.

A 2025 poll by Pennsylvania State University reveals the steadfast support of the Nation State Law by the Israeli public (particularly since the Hamas attack of October 7 2023) of whom 56 per cent even favour expelling their own compatriots if they are Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Meanwhile Amjad from Madama, expressed his conviction — held by most Palestinians — which will make any Israeli aim to ethnically cleanse land of Palestinians very hard to achieve: “We all know, and the entire world knows, that they [the Israelis] are doing this: raid houses, destroy our property, detain and imprison us and even kill us, block our roads with iron gates and checkpoints, steal our properties, prevent us from working on our land… just for one purpose: to pressure us to leave our homeland. This will never happen and we’re ready to sacrifice with everything for our land and dignity.”