Israeli Army Uses Rare Area A Seizure Orders to Link New Settlements Encircling Jenin

Ahmed Zeidat was pruning his olive trees when settlers ran at him. They punched him in the face and stomach before he escaped on his tractor, with the settlers still chasing. Israeli soldiers arrived, pulled the settlers off, and detained Zeidat.

He asked the officer why he was being held.

"He told me I was on private land that I wasn't allowed to access," Zeidat told Middle East Eye. When Zeidat pressed him on how his own land had become private, he said the soldier answered: "It belongs to us, and you're not allowed to enter it."

Zeidat was released and ordered not to return to a plot that once produced 600 kilos of olive oil a year. "My land, the fruit of my labour and toil, is forbidden to me," he said. "Now I look at it from afar. I can't even look, because my heart aches."

His case is one incident inside a larger, documented shift in the northern West Bank. Since Israel's 2005 disengagement dismantled four settlements around Jenin — Ganim, Kadim, Homesh and Sa-Nur — Palestinians in the area had largely avoided direct contact with settlers. That changed after the current Israeli government took office in late 2022.

The paper trail

According to Tariq Ighbaria, director of the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission in Jenin, Israel has approved 11 new settlements in the area in addition to reviving the four evacuated sites. Settler families have moved into some locations; roads and infrastructure are under construction at others.

In late July, the Israeli military issued 15 military orders seizing nearly 200 dunams of Palestinian-owned land in Jenin, according to the CWRC. Haaretz reported the land was taken to physically connect two new settlements south of the city, Noa and Emek Dotan.

The seized land sits in Area A, the zone the Oslo Accords placed under full Palestinian Authority control. Kerem Navot, an Israeli group that tracks settlement activity, said this marks the first time the army has used Area A seizure orders to link illegal settlements rather than for stated military purposes.

In June, Haaretz reported the army had begun building a permanent military base inside Jenin city itself, in the Jabriyat neighbourhood, also in Area A. Sources told the paper it is the first permanent army post built there since Oslo, and is meant in part to protect settlers returning to the area.

Ighbaria said bulldozing is ongoing in the mountains of Masliya and Qabatiya, and that formal seizure orders likely undercount the real footprint. "If 200 dunams are confiscated to construct a road linking two settlements, the road and its security perimeter could effectively lead to the seizure of hundreds of additional dunams, perhaps reaching 600 or 700," he said.

The new roads are also cutting villages off from Jenin and from routes to Nablus, Tulkarm and Tubas, according to Ighbaria, with residents of Arraba, Marqa, Masliya, Qabatiya, Jaba, Fandaqumiya and Silat al-Harithiya reporting growing difficulty and danger reaching the city, compounded by settler vehicles now moving through farmland and on shared roads.

Separately, Tariq al-Shaer, a vineyard owner on the Arraba Plain south of Jenin, was forced to harvest and sell his crop wholesale after receiving notice that his vineyard would be bulldozed.