Event recording | The Wild West: Grazing, seizing and looting by Israeli settlers in the West Bank
8 July 2022Shepherding outposts – set up by Israeli settlers in violation of international law – have become one of the most significant mechanisms for land seizure in the West Bank.
Residents of these outposts, who engage in farming activities, use land in adjacent areas for purposes of grazing and herding livestock, thus displacing Palestinian farming communities. Accompanying incidents of violence against Palestinians are generally neither prevented nor investigated by the Israeli military or security forces.
As reported in The Guardian, Kerem Navot, a local NGO focused on Israeli land policies in the West Bank, has documented the growth of shepherding outposts and their impact on Palestinian communities in a new digital map platform and report titled “The Wild West: Grazing, seizing and looting by Israeli settlers in the West Bank”. Drawing on several years of fieldwork, the report maps existing farm outposts as well as areas that have become inaccessible to Palestinian shepherds as a result. At present, there are 77 such outposts, 46 of which were established between 2017 and 2021 alone, which points to a sharp increase in recent years. Taken together, Kerem Navot estimates that these outposts have led to settler control over 60,000 acres of land in the West Bank.
To formally mark the publication of the digital map platform and report, Kerem Navot and the Diakonia IHL Centre, which supported this project, held a virtual launch event on 30 June 2022. A recording of the launch event, during which Dror Etkes, the founding director of Kerem Navot, presented the project’s main findings, can be found below.
