Bulldozers Clear Kilometres of Olive Groves on Arraba-Ya'bad Road as Settlements Ring West Bank Farming Town

Bulldozers worked both sides of the Arraba-Ya'bad road in early September, tearing olive trees from the ground and reducing structures to twisted metal, according to an Al Jazeera correspondent who drove the route. Israeli flags had been planted along the cleared land, the correspondent reported, stretching to the Arraba Junction and past markers denoting Area A, the West Bank zone nominally under Palestinian Authority control.

On the al-Fari family's land, two women were seen pleading with soldiers who kept them back from machines finishing the last of the family's olive groves, the correspondent reported. The family later said soldiers confiscated their phones so they could not film the demolition and photographed their IDs. A second bulldozer worked simultaneously further down the road; on another plot, families salvaged wood from the uprooted trees.

The destruction sits inside a wider pattern described by Ahmed Arda, the mayor of Arraba, in an interview with Al Jazeera. Arda said his town is now hemmed in by the existing Mevo Dotan settlement to the west, a newly founded settlement called Emek Dotan to the north, and new settler outposts to the south.

According to Arda, the Arraba military camp, evacuated in Israel's 2005 disengagement along with four settlements, was reoccupied by the Israeli military in March 2026. Two months later, caravans and bulldozers arrived under military escort to begin building Emek Dotan on 220 dunums, about 0.2 square kilometres, of Arraba's land. The settlement was formally inaugurated on August 9, 2026, in a ceremony attended by Israeli ministers. Arda said settler attacks from Emek Dotan began the same day.

Arda also said that after October 2023, 1,500 dunums of farmland west of Arraba near Mevo Dotan became inaccessible because of settler activity.

He described a night visit from Israeli security forces around the time of the settlement's opening.

"I'm in my own house and they're all armed, mind you," Arda said, recounting the soldiers' demand that he instruct mosque imams to stop posting updates on Facebook and stop residents from confronting settlers. "Not one Palestinian has hit any settler in the area, but every single day there are attacks by settlers on Palestinian citizens."

Arda said he refused. "We are people living on our land, living in our country, we want to live in peace," he told the soldiers, according to his account. "You are the ones who came at us and this land is ours."

The Arraba Plain holds 33,000 dunums of arable land and is described by Al Jazeera as the most agriculturally productive area in the northern West Bank, within Jenin governorate, which the report says yields more olive oil annually than any other governorate in the territory. Israeli settlements and outposts across the West Bank are illegal under international law.