Barrier

Saeed Ayed* watches over his livestock herd. The animals are starving and parched due to a two-week-long Israeli siege on the Ras al-Ahmar Bedouin community in the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley.

Access to the community has been blocked since mid-September, as Israeli forces continue building a barrier through Palestinian land in the area, including a road for military patrols, trenches and embankments.

Since the road closures began, movement for Palestinians has been severely restricted. They are forced to move around at night, transporting water, fodder and milk via donkeys under the cover of darkness to avoid detection by Israeli soldiers and settlers.

Ayed told Al Jazeera that no water had entered the community over the past three days after Israeli forces sealed the access points residents had been using to bring in supplies.

“The situation is dire. We are completely besieged, and the livestock cannot survive without water and food for this long,” Ayed said. “We own 15,000 head of livestock, and we fear they will perish because of the siege.”

Ras al-Ahmar is a 300-person village home to around 50 families who have lived off livestock and herding since the 1970s. Ayed said that Israeli settler attacks – part of a wider pogrom against Palestinians across the West Bank – had intensified since February, accusing settlers of trying to force residents out to seize their land.

“We have faced livestock theft, attacks on our dwellings, beatings of residents and vandalism of our homes. This was happening almost daily, yet we refused to leave. Now, they are completely besieging us to force us out,” he added.

The greatest challenge facing residents is restricted access to medical care as a result of the siege, a particular concern for the elderly.

Disease is also rampant among livestock, particularly newborn animals. And with veterinary teams unable to reach the area and treat the animals, deaths have been reported.

The military barrier – which Israel calls Crimson Thread and says it is needed for security – runs for roughly 20km (12 miles) through the northern Jordan Valley, with a width of up to 50 metres (165 feet).

Construction expanded early this year, including the digging of trenches and the bulldozing of agricultural land that damaged wells, water networks and greenhouses. The Israeli military seized nearly 115 hectares, 85 percent of which is privately owned Palestinian land, according to Kerem Navot, which monitors Israeli land policies in the West Bank.

Abdullah Bisharat, head of the village council of Ras al-Ahmar and Atuf, a nearby rural area also facing the military blockade, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli blockade has stopped 51 schoolchildren from attending classes for two weeks because vehicles can no longer reach them.

Israeli forces confiscated a tractor belonging to the village council on Sunday, detaining its driver as he was delivering animal fodder and water to Ras al-Ahmar, Bisharat said.

“We reached out to human rights organisations, but unfortunately no one was able to break the siege. Hundreds of people there are suffering, the majority of whom are women and children,” Bisharat added.

Broader context

The targeting of Bedouin and herding communities in the Jordan Valley is part of a mounting pressure campaign on residents to abandon their properties by restricting access to land and pastures. The tactics include settler violence, the demolition of structures and the closure of roads and access points.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has described Bedouin and herding communities as among the groups most vulnerable to displacement in the West Bank. Dozens of Palestinian communities across the West Bank have been entirely or partially displaced since 2023, when Israel began its genocide in Gaza and ramped up its attacks on the West Bank after the October 7 Hamas attack.

OCHA has reported that at least 130 Palestinian communities have experienced full or partial displacement since January 2023, with 48 communities completely displaced, including 12 from January to August.

According to OCHA, more than 2,500 Palestinians were displaced in 2026 due to settler attacks and related access restrictions, out of a total of more than 6,400 displaced since 2023.

As the Israeli elections – scheduled for October 27 – approach, Palestinian analysts and rights advocates argue that the measures being implemented on the ground are entrenching a new reality that may persist regardless of the next government.

Hassan Mleihat, chairman of the al-Baydar Organization for Defense of Bedouin Rights, told Al Jazeera that settlers appear to be rapidly intensifying measures aimed at displacing Bedouin communities in the lead-up to the elections.

Mleihat said that Israel’s objective was to expel as many Palestinians as possible and seize control of their land.

“The road being constructed near Ras al-Ahmar aims to dominate the area’s land under security pretexts and to isolate Palestinian communities into tiny geographical pockets, effectively confining their presence there,” he said.

A new reality

Observers believe the significance of these Israeli measures against Palestinian communities extends beyond their immediate impact on the population, creating demographic, geographic and security-related changes that may prove irreversible even if the Israeli political landscape shifts after the elections.

Adel Shadid, an expert on Israeli affairs, told Al Jazeera that Israel currently exercises an unprecedented degree of control over Palestinian territory in the West Bank. Palestinians, he said, live in small, fragmented and scattered enclaves with Israeli control over security, military and economic matters, as well as the minutiae of daily life.

He said the change was not only limited to geography but also entails normalising the presence of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank so that they are viewed as an integral part of the region’s fabric, rather than a temporary presence or a reality subject to change.

“This shift is accompanied by the entrenchment of the perception that the West Bank is no longer viewed as a Palestinian area – or even a disputed one – but rather as a territory where Jews have the right to live in safety and security,” he said.

Shadid argued that this perspective also shapes how Israeli and Palestinian communities in the West Bank are perceived by the Israeli state. Israeli settlers are presented as a population requiring protection, while Palestinians are increasingly framed primarily as a security threat.

“This logic extends to how the land and the very elements of life are treated. A tree, for instance, might be viewed as a potential resource for acts targeting the Jewish community; consequently, cutting it down is seen, within this framework, as a security measure that warrants no intervention,” he said.

Shadid said this was also changing perceptions of the role of the Israeli army and police in the West Bank. He argued that the security forces’ role was increasingly seen as protecting settlers against a so-called “Palestinian threat”, rather than restraining settler aggression against Palestinians.

“This new reality is not tied to the current Israeli government. Rather, it creates a dynamic that will persist beyond the elections, regardless of the outcome,” Shadid said.

*Saeed Ayed is a pseudonym used at the individual’s request for security reasons.

COMSTOCK, Texas — The Trump administration has started building a border wall through a west Texas section of the Big Bend region, marking the first major construction in an area of the U.S.-Mexico border where the administration’s plans have met heavy, bipartisan opposition.

The start of construction marks a milestone in the administration’s $46-billion efforts to line the border with walls, barriers, roads and technology as it seeks to make good on a campaign promise by President Trump to finish the wall. And it comes as Customs and Border Protection says it has doubled the pace at which it is building the wall across the border.

Customs and Border Protection said in a statement to the Associated Press that “border wall panel installation is underway” in a 47-mile stretch of Hudspeth County in west Texas known as Big Bend 1. There are five project areas that make up the roughly 500-mile Big Bend region stretching from an area of Hudspeth County south of El Paso to Lake Amistad.

CBP said the first panels were erected Wednesday. On a map on the agency’s website where it posts updates of wall construction along the southern border, a photo showed a crane lifting one of the 30-foot-tall steel wall panels into place as construction workers looked on.

The new activity was separate from a border infrastructure project in the nearby Big Bend National Park, where the administration has suspended construction in an attempt to reach out to opponents.

In the broader Big Bend region of Texas, CBP has run up against concerted opposition from landowners, environmental groups, business owners and ranchers who say the remote region isn’t a high-traffic area for illegal immigration. Political leaders from both parties, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), have joined the opposition.

Activists said Friday they would continue opposing the border infrastructure projects in the rest of the Big Bend region, even as the panels were being installed.

Clara Benson, one of the founders of the No Big Bend Wall Coalition, which has been fighting against CBP’s plans, said in an interview Friday that the organization had been receiving reports of trucks moving supplies into the remote area along the Rio Grande and that contractors had been clearing yards to stage supplies.

Speaking from Washington, D.C., where she and others in the coalition were meeting with lawmakers, she said that the organization and others would continue to fight the wall-building plans across the region.

“We will continue to fight for this land no matter what the outcome is. We will continue fighting to the end,” said Benson. “You talk to people in west Texas and they say even if they put it up, we’ll fight for them to take it down. So this fight is not over.”

The news comes as the administration is speeding forward with a plan to line the entire border with a combination of 30-foot-tall steel bollard walls, barriers designed to stop vehicles from crossing the border, new patrol roads, and various technologies to deter and detect migrants or smugglers from crossing the border.

Customs and Border Protection said it is building an average of 12 miles of barriers per week along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico and recently reached a milestone of 200 miles of new barriers built since the second Trump administration took office. The 12-miles-a-week average is double the pace that the agency’s head, Rodney Scott, cited earlier this year.

The agency has faced opposition from environmental groups, a small town that worries the wall will cause flooding in its area, Native Americans who say the construction is disturbing sacred sites and landowners who say the construction will infringe on their land.

In Texas, much of the opposition has centered on the agency’s plans for Big Bend National Park, in the state’s southwest on the Rio Grande that is a draw for tourists from around the world. But up- and downriver outside the park, much of the land is owned by private landowners, many of whom have organized against the government’s efforts.

Earlier this week, landowners, ranchers and business owners in the Big Bend region along with a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the region’s landscape and heritage sued to stop the administration’s plans.

Activists and landowners have also shown up at county meetings to push their elected officials not to cooperate with contractors hired by CBP to build the wall, and many landowners have refused to allow government officials or contractors onto their land to survey it.

Santana writes for the Associated Press.