Hosim Aida looks out on acres of his land he cannot access as olive harvest season approaches, in the town of Sinjil.
Inside the Occupied West Bank
In Sinjil and Deir Jarir villagers are headed for a fraught harvest season as a new wave of settler outposts surrounds them.
“IT’S BECOME A gigantic prison,” says Moataz Tawafsha, mayor of Sinjil, a Palestinian town north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where an Israeli military fence is cutting residents off from their farmland and neighbours.
Built along Route 60, the five-metre-high metal barrier, topped with barbed wire, has left just one monitored route in and out of the town. Israel says it is intended to prevent attacks on settlers on the highway.
Israeli authorities requisitioned around 30 dunums of Palestinian-owned land for the fence in February 2024, followed by an additional 15 dunums that August. By September, Israeli forces had begun bulldozing land, uprooting more than 200 trees, including 135 olive trees.
“Around one hundred families have become cut off from their land, so they are being deprived of their livelihoods,” Tawafsha says.
He explains that due to the scale of land loss, economic deprivation has hit the town, with many families dependent on young people who have emigrated, and work abroad, to send money home.
“We have people here who worked as labourers in Israel, and for the last three years they have been unable to go to work. Their permits have been revoked,” he said
The fence is only part of the pressure on Sinjil. The number of settler outposts around the town has grown.
In April 2025, after a new settler outpost appeared on privately owned Palestinian land south of the town, a series of raids followed. The UN documented the burning of four homes, the theft and killing of livestock and assaults on residents. At least 35 people were injured.
A 48-year-old man died of a heart attack, reportedly triggered by tear gas inhalation during the violence.
“We have eight outposts now in every direction,” Tawafsha says.
Hosam Aida, a Palestinian-American farmer in his 70s, is able to see the outposts from the far end of his fields in the part of Sinjil that is separated from them by a road.
He owns a large amount of land on the other side that is now extremely dangerous for him to attempt to reach.
Two days earlier, he says, a worker on his land saw settlers taking olives and confronted them. When Aida arrived, he found around 20 Israeli soldiers at the scene.
“I told them that I was an American citizen, and they asked me if I could prove that the land was mine,” he says.
Aida waited an hour and a half for police to arrive. He was told to file a complaint at an Israeli police station, which he visited the following day. After waiting for hours, he says, he left when an officer told him she could not speak English or Arabic, and he would have to wait for someone else.
“One of the soldiers who was there had also lived in America, he lived a few streets across from me in Brooklyn, actually, and he told me that I shouldn’t try to access that land any more, that there is a risk I would be shot,” Aida says in dismay.
On 11 July 2025, two Palestinian men were killed during a settler attack on farmers working land on the outskirts of Sinjil and neighbouring Al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya.
One was Sayfollah Kamel Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American visiting family. His family and witnesses said he was beaten by settlers and that an ambulance was prevented from reaching him. The other was Muhammad Rizq Hassan al-Shalabi, 23, who was found dead with gunshot wounds.
East of Ramallah, in Deir Jarir, another Palestinian village of roughly 5,000 people, residents face similar pressures. Olive trees have been burned or cut down, farmland damaged and livestock targeted.
There has been a spate of killings in incidents involving settlers there too, and when you drive through the town, every third building or so is spray-painted with an image of the faces of those who have died.
From the roof of the local community centre, council member Adel points towards several settler outposts that now surround the village.
He says the situation has changed dramatically since October 7th, and that there was very little settler activity here before.
Movement restrictions have made commuting increasingly difficult, while attacks on farmers and their property have undermined the village’s agricultural economy. Olive oil, once a mainstay of local production, is now being brought in from elsewhere, he says.
In July 2026, two men were killed during a raid in Deir Jarir involving settlers and Israeli forces. The victims were identified as 53-year-old council member Odeh Abdul Rahim Odeh Farakhneh and 26-year-old Ahmad Adel Abu Mukho.
According to OCHA, Israeli forces shot and killed the two men after settlers arrived attempting to seize sheep and a crowd gathered. The Israeli military said its forces opened fire after coming under attack; residents accused the forces of protecting the settlers.
“Nowhere is safe here now. Not for older people, not for families and not for children,” Adel says.
Restrictions on movement have become so severe, he adds, that children can attend school only three days a week.
“Someone who works in Ramallah, they cross two checkpoints daily. Someone who had a commute that used to take under half an hour sits in traffic for hours these days,” he says.
Adel says seven people have been killed in incidents linked to settler activity in and around the village, without meaningful accountability. He says even reporting attacks can carry risks: one farmer who went to complain that settlers had taken his land was detained overnight.
At the entrance to Deir Jarir, the first house stands abandoned.
A neighbour says the family who lived there, including several young children, left after repeated harassment by settlers from a nearby outpost. Settlers had made a path across the land towards the houses, he says, and their presence became increasingly threatening.
“Now they are coming during the day, and sitting here in the garden of my house, sometimes armed,” he says.
He has started working from home, while his children sometimes cannot get to school or university. After his car was stolen and his windows smashed, the family installed bars on the windows.
He and his wife now take turns sleeping in shifts, worried that their home could be raided. He believes the pressure is designed to make them leave, as their neighbours did.
“If I leave though, the same thing will happen to the next house, to my neighbours. And then the next, and then eventually, the whole town will be lost,” he says.
“So we stay.”