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Israeli settlers displace 15 Palestinian families in West Bank: Official
A Palestinian man stands on the rubble of a house demolished by Israeli settlers the previous day in a village on the outskirts of Jericho, in the occupied West Bank
Israeli settlers have forced 15 Palestinian families to tear down their homes and depart from the northern Jordan Valley in the northeastern occupied West Bank, according to a local official.
Mahdi Daraghmeh, head of the al-Malih Village Council, told the Wafa news agency on Tuesday that the families had begun dismantling their homes amid intensifying assaults by settlers.
According to Wafa, seven additional families from the nearby Maita community were forced to leave several days earlier following similar settler attacks and threats.
In a separate incident, settlers assaulted men from Nabi Samwil village, northwest of occupied East Jerusalem, injuring one, who was taken to a hospital with bruises, Wafa reported.
‘Entrenching Israeli control’
This week the Israeli government also approved a plan to designate large areas of the occupied West Bank as “state property”, shifting the burden of proof to Palestinians to establish ownership of their land.
In a joint statement on Tuesday, the foreign ministers of Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt said the step aims at imposing a new legal and administrative reality to consolidate control over the occupied land.
‘Jordan is next’: West Bank annexation signals ‘silent transfer’
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/17/jordan-is-next-west-bank-annexation-signals-silent
For decades, the “alternative homeland” – the notion that Jordan should become the Palestinian state – was dismissed in Amman’s diplomatic circles as a distant nightmare or a conspiracy theory.
Today, under the shadow of a far-right Israeli government and a devastating genocidal war in Gaza, that nightmare has become an operational reality.
The alarm in the Hashemite Kingdom reached a fever pitch on Sunday, following the Israeli cabinet’s approval of measures to register vast swaths of the occupied West Bank as “state land” under the Israeli Ministry of Justice. The move, described by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as a “settlement revolution”, effectively bypasses the military administration that has governed the occupied territory since 1967, treating it instead as sovereign Israeli soil.
For Jordan, this bureaucratic annexation is the final signal that the status quo is dead. With the Israeli military’s “Iron Wall” operation crushing refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarem, Jordan’s political and military establishment is no longer asking if a forced transfer is coming, but how to stop it.
“The transfer is no longer a threat; it is moving to execution,” Mamdouh al-Abbadi, Jordan’s former deputy prime minister, told Al Jazeera. “We are seeing the practical application … The alternative homeland is something that is coming; after this West Bank, the enemy will move to the East Bank, to Jordan.”
The ‘silent transfer’
The fear in Amman is not just about military invasion, but about a “soft transfer”, making life in the West Bank unliveable to force a gradual exodus towards Jordan.
Sunday’s decision to transfer land registration authority to the Israeli Justice Ministry is viewed in Jordan as a critical step in this process. By erasing the Jordanian and Ottoman land registries that have protected Palestinian property rights for a century, Israel is clearing the legal path for massive settlement expansion.
Al-Abbadi, a veteran voice in Jordanian politics, pointed to symbolic but dangerous shifts in Israeli military nomenclature.
“There is a new brigade in the Israeli army, named the Gilead Brigade,” al-Abbadi noted. “What is Gilead? Gilead is a mountainous region near the capital, Amman. This means the Israelis are proceeding with their strategic practices from the Nile to the Euphrates.”
He argued that the 1994 Wadi Araba Treaty is effectively null and void in the eyes of the current Israeli leadership.
“Smotrich’s ideology is not just the view of one person; it has become the doctrine of the state,” al-Abbadi said, warning that the Israeli consensus has shifted permanently. “They are the ones who killed the Wadi Araba treaty before it was even born … If we do not wake up, the strategy will be ‘either us or them’. There is no third option.”
