Bardala, West Bank
CNN
—
Jihad Suleiman Al-Sawafta, 46, has lived on his farm in the occupied West Bank village of Bardala his entire life. But when Israeli settlers showed up in December, Al-Sawafta said his land, and his livelihood, shrank to a fraction of its former self.
“The settlers brought another settler here and placed him in our area. The Israelis built a road that separates us from grazing and agricultural areas, and the settlers don’t allow us to farm on them,” he told CNN.
“They crowded the area. They took thousands of dunams (1,000 square meters) from Bardala and its grazing lands,” he said, referring to his Palestinian town in the northern part of the West Bank. He added that the Jordan Valley, a fertile strip of land long considered the West Bank’s breadbasket, had been “largely emptied”of its Palestinian residents.
Israeli forces were overseeing the paving of a new road during CNN’s visit in late January. Al-Sawafta said the military maintains a 24-hour presence, providing security for settlers, making it dangerous for him to cross and tend the crops he planted in nearby fields.
Responding to a request for comment about the situation in Bardala, the Israeli military told CNN that the status of the outpost had not changed, and that the new road was intended for security forces, paved in accordance with a military order. “Palestinians living in the area were not harmed during the work,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.
Herding outposts like the one set up on Al-Sawafta’s land are often established by Israeli settlers on hilltops with a few caravans and sometimes livestock to mark their claim. Monitoring groups say they are notorious for swallowing up vast swathes of land and prohibiting Palestinian residents from moving freely. The outposts are illegal under both Israeli and international law, and the state is not allowed to finance or build on them.
The number of Israeli herding outposts has dramatically increased since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition took power in 2022 on a platform of settlement expansion. The government includes ministers who are themselves settlers and want to annex the occupied territory to Israel. In the wake of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, which triggered Israel’s invasion of Gaza, settlers have accelerated land grabs with support from the state.
Israeli herding outposts have ballooned by nearly 50% since the war broke out, according to a joint report shared exclusively with CNN by Peace Now and Kerem Navot, two Israeli advocacy groups that oppose settlements and track their development, covering data up to the end of December 2024.
Settlers established 49 new illegal shepherding outposts between October 7, 2023, and December 2024, seizing large swathes of surrounding land, according to the report which was corroborated by a CNN analysis of satellite imagery of the area.
CNN partnered with the US artificial intelligence company RAIC Labs to monitor the establishment and expansion of new outposts in the West Bank. RAIC Labs used its AI-powered platform to analyze and compare satellite imagery of the West Bank captured by Planet Labs in October 2023 and September 2024, identifying changes in the 49 outposts such as newly constructed structures, recently cleared areas, and emerging roads, which were manually verified by CNN.
Peace Now and Kerem Navot estimate that shepherding outposts, occupied by a few hundred settlers, now cover almost 14% of the West Bank. Some of the unauthorized outposts are run by extremist Israeli settlers and settler groups that were sanctioned under the Biden administration, according to the monitoring groups.
Of the total land seized by settlers in the West Bank since the 1990s using herding outposts, 70% has been taken in the last two and half years alone, the report found.
“It’s important to understand that the herding outposts are a national project, a state project. This is not a project which is initiated by individuals, it’s a project which the state of Israel is standing behind, is budgeting for, is facilitating, is protecting,” Dror Etkes, founder of Kerem Navot and co-author of the report, told CNN.
CNN reached out to several members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, for comment on the practice, but none agreed to an interview. CNN also requested comment from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, but did not receive a response.
The IDF told CNN that its “top priority was to ensure the security of all residents in the area.” It added that, through the Civil Administration, it works to enforce against illegal structures in Area C, which comprises about 60% of the West Bank and is fully Israeli-controlled, “in accordance with the operational situation assessment and with approval from the political echelon.”
‘Empowered to do whatever they want’
There is no official planning approval for outposts, unlike officially recognized Jewish settlements, which tend to be larger, more organized urban developments. Settlements are considered illegal under international law and by much of the international community, but Israel disputes that.
For Palestinians living near the outposts, their expansion in recent years has often meant losing access to their land and natural resources, as roads, fences, and settler activity gradually cut them off.
The land grabs have gone hand-in-hand with an escalation in violence by Israeli security forces and settlers against Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank.
Israel’s defense minister said at the end of February that he had instructed the military to “prevent the return of residents” who had been displaced by Israel’s military operations in four refugee camps in the northern part of the territory beginning January 21. The United Nations estimated that some 40,000 have been forced to flee their homes.
There are also mounting concerns among Palestinians that US President Donald Trump may endorse annexation of the occupied territory, which is home to more than 3 million Palestinians. “We’re discussing that with many of your representatives,” Trump said in a joint press conference with Netanyahu in Washington, DC, in February. “People do like the idea, but we haven’t taken a position on it yet.”
His proposal for Gaza to be emptied of its inhabitants and developed have raised alarm among rights groups and Palestinian communities, who worry a similar rhetoric could be applied to the occupied West Bank.
Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967. It annexed East Jerusalem, which is also considered occupied under international law, in 1980.
Hagit Ofran, who works with Peace Now and co-authored the report, told CNN: “It is hard to believe President Trump or anyone in his administration would stand against the formal annexation of lands in the West Bank to Israel. No wonder the settlers and the Israeli government feel empowered to do whatever they want.”
According to the report from Peace Now and Kerem Navot, more than 60 Palestinian shepherding communities have been forcibly displaced since July 2022 – the majority of these since October 7.
At least 14 illegal herding outposts have since been built on or near land from which Palestinians were expelled just beforehand, the report said. CNN verified the establishment of those outposts by analyzing satellite imagery, detecting new dirt roads, buildings and bulldozing.
Etkes told CNN the practice was not only forcing Palestinians off their land but paving the way to settlement expansion. “Communities who are dependent on agriculture, who are dependent on herding, have to flee. It’s not only an economic catastrophe, but also a cultural catastrophe, a personal catastrophe,” Etkes said.
“The idea behind it is clear, it is to take the open areas in the West Bank to make sure Palestinians cannot access them, and eventually to hand them over to Israeli settlers.”
In July last year, the United Nations’ top court said Israel should end its decades-long occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, evacuating settlers from the territories designated for a future Palestinian state and halting any new settlement activity. Israel’s foreign minister at the time rejected the non-binding ruling as “fundamentally wrong” and one-sided.
Despite outposts being illegal even under Israeli law, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said there is a “consistent pattern of Israeli authorities’ involvement, assistance and financing of the construction of outposts, as well as their operation.”
Documents uncovered by Peace Now last year showed how the Israeli government has budgeted millions to protect the small, unauthorized farms. The monitoring group said the money paid for vehicles, drones, cameras, generators, electric gates, light poles, solar panels and fences.
The Israeli government approved 75 million shekels ($21 million) in December 2023 for providing security in the West Bank to what it called “young settlements.” Orit Strock, the Minister of Settlements and National Mission, told the Associated Press that the funds were coordinated with the Defense Ministry and “carried out in accordance with all laws.”
The Ministry of Settlements and Strock’s office did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
CNN has seen evidence that an organization with close links to the Israeli state has helped settlers set up herding outposts. Contracts obtained by Peace Now from the World Zionist Organization (WZO) — an international body that helped create the Jewish state — and reviewed by CNN show how the group has allocated land in the West Bank to settlers.
Israeli law affords the WZO semi-governmental status, giving it authority “for the development and settlement of the country.” The WZO’s Settlement Division, which describes itself as an “arm of the Israeli state” and is funded by Israeli public money, is responsible for managing the allocation of land to “form and strengthen the settlement of Jews in periphery areas, by increasing the hold on the lands of the country that were passed onto the division by the government of Israel,” according to its website.
While the contracts obtained by Peace Now specify the land is for grazing or farming, the watchdog said that it found in some cases that the WZO had given settlers rights to private land belonging to Palestinians and that outposts were also built on the land illegally. CNN’s satellite imagery analysis found that buildings and roads have already been constructed on or near 18 of these sites.
CNN has reached out to the WZO multiple times for comment on the construction of illegal outposts on land it had allocated. The organization has not replied.
Most of the land seized by settlers for illegal shepherding outposts is not classified as Israeli state land, according to mapping data from the Israeli Civil Administration analyzed by Peace Now and Kerem Navot. Nearly 60% of the land, around 470 square kilometers, is either privately owned by Palestinians, has unclear ownership, or falls within Palestinian Authority territory, the report said.
For Ahmed Daraghma, a Palestinian farmer from al-Farisiyah in the Jordan Valley, a 2021 contract granted by the WZO’s Settlement Division and viewed by CNN appeared to belatedly legitimize Tene Yarok, a herding outpost that threatens his home and livelihood, leaving him with few options. “The situation here is extremely difficult. Since October 7, it’s been getting harder day by day,” he told CNN.
Daraghma said that settlers regularly chase away his sheep and terrorize the community’s children late into the night. “They threaten us that if we go up to this mountain there, they will come to us at night. They say, ‘If you go here, we will come to take your children,’” he said.
A few weeks later, he said his family was forced to flee.
CNN’s Kareem Khadder contributed to this report.