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Evidence: Iman Hamayel, from the El-Bireh region of the West Bank, shows a document proving her ownership of land appropriated by Psagot winery, 13 September 2025
Ahmad Al-Bazz
Across the rolling hills south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, vineyards fill the arid landscape, the vines stretching in rows towards the horizon. Next to recently planted stocks, the traces of a forcibly displaced community can still be seen. A child’s bicycle, an old suitcase and a dusty boot are among the belongings left behind by Palestinians who fled after enduring relentless Israeli settler violence.
Issa Abu al-Qabash, known as ‘Abu Safi’, was older than the state of Israel when settlers attacked him and violently expelled him from his home in nearby Khirbet ar-Ratheem. ‘They kept threatening us, every night, every day, every hour they humiliated us… They hit me – five of them – with M16s, right between my eyes. They told me, “You will die if you don’t leave. You have five days to go”.’
Near Abu Safi’s land, new vineyards have recently been planted. The South Hebron Hills are one of the regions where settler grape cultivation is expanding fast. As settler attacks intensify, Palestinian land is depopulated, seized and absorbed into expanding Israeli settlements, paving the way for the annexation of the West Bank.
‘My grandfather bought the land from another tribe during Ottoman times, and we had been living there ever since. It was passed on to my father, and then to us… We lived off this land, from its produce, from its blessings,’ said Abu Safi. But now ‘everything is gone… We are ruined, scattered… They uprooted us, expelled us from our own land.’
Abu Safi died a few months after this interview. Khirbet ar-Ratheem is one of more than 70 Palestinian communities forcibly removed since October 2023, as Israeli violence aimed at displacing and dispossessing Palestinians has escalated across the occupied West Bank. Over the past two years, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed, including at least 213 children, with thousands more injured in attacks by the Israeli military or settlers, often acting in coordination. (…)
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(3) See Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
(4) Ayşe Parla and Ceren Özgül, ‘Property, dispossession and citizenship in Turkey; Or, the history of the Gezi uprising starts in the Surp Hagop Armenian cemetery’, in Public Culture, vol 28, no 3, New York, September 2016.
(5) See Raymond H Kévorkian, ‘The Property Law and the Spoliation of Ottoman Armenians’, in Thomas Kühne, Marc A Mamigonian and Mary Jane Rein (eds), Documenting the Armenian Genocide: Essays in Honor of Taner Akçam, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2024.
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(7) Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Truth in Telling: Reconciling realities in the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians’, American Historical Review, vol 114, no 4, Chicago, 2009.
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(10) Uğur Ümit Üngör, ‘Lost in Commemoration: the Armenian genocide in memory and identity’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol 48, no 2, 2014.
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