Palestinians Fear Displacement from an Annexed Jordan Valley

A view of the West Bank settlement of Ma'ale Efraim on the hills of the Jordan Valley, February 18, 2020. (AP)
A view of the West Bank settlement of Ma'ale Efraim on the hills of the Jordan Valley, February 18, 2020. (AP)
TT
20

Palestinians Fear Displacement from an Annexed Jordan Valley

A view of the West Bank settlement of Ma'ale Efraim on the hills of the Jordan Valley, February 18, 2020. (AP)
A view of the West Bank settlement of Ma'ale Efraim on the hills of the Jordan Valley, February 18, 2020. (AP)

For generations, the people of Fasayil herded animals on the desert bluffs and palm-shaded lowlands of the Jordan Valley. Today, nearly every man in the Palestinian village works for Jewish settlers in the sprawling modern farms to the north and south.

The grazing lands to the west and east, leading down to the banks of the biblical Jordan River, have been swallowed up by the settlements or fenced off by the Israeli military. So instead of leading sheep out to pasture, the men rise before dawn to work in the settlements for around $3 an hour — or they move away, reported The Associated Press.

“Everyone here works in the settlements, there’s nothing else,” said Iyad Taamra, a member of the village council who runs a small grocery store. "If you have some money you go somewhere else where there is a future.”

Palestinians fear communities across the Jordan Valley will meet a similar fate if Israel proceeds with its plans to annex the territory, which accounts for around a quarter of the occupied West Bank and was once seen as the breadbasket of a future Palestinian state.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to annex the valley and all of Israel's far-flung West Bank settlements, in line with President Donald Trump's Middle East plan, which overwhelmingly favors Israel and has been rejected by the Palestinians. The process could begin as soon as July 1.

Netanyahu has said Israel will annex the land but not the people who rely on it, telling an Israeli newspaper they will remain in an “enclave” under limited self-rule, with Israel maintaining security control.

Few if any Palestinians would be given citizenship, leaving their legal status uncertain. In a region that heavily relies on agriculture, the loss of farm and grazing land could force many to relocate.

Shaul Arieli, a retired Israeli military commander who worked on border demarcation during the peace process in the 1990s, estimates that the Palestinians would lose up to 70,000 acres (280 square kilometers) of private land. He expects Israel will carve out a new 200-kilometer (124-mile) border between the Jordan Valley and the rest of the West Bank, and a 60-kilometer (37-mile) border around the Palestinian city of Jericho.

He based his conclusions on maps presented by Netanyahu and the White House, which show Israel extending sovereignty over large swaths of land while leaving most populated areas outside its borders.

Itay Epshtain, a special adviser to the Norwegian Refugee Council, said Palestinians would lose some of the limited protections they have, once Israeli courts are no longer formally obliged to consider international laws related to military occupation.

"Palestinians void of civil status in Israel, and not coming under the authority of the military commander, would neither have standing in the High Court nor the ability to challenge decisions of the government," he said, according to the AP.

The Jordan Valley is home to around 60,000 Palestinians, according to the UN., but nearly 90 percent of the land is part of what is known as Area C, the three-fifths of the West Bank that is under complete Israeli control. In the Jordan Valley, it includes closed military areas and around 50 agricultural settlements housing some 12,000 Israelis.

Palestinians are barred from those areas, and even on the lands they own, they are forbidden from digging wells or building any kind of infrastructure without hard-to-get military permits. From 2009 until 2016, less than 2 percent of more than 3,300 permit applications in Area C were successful, according to Peace Now, an Israeli anti-settlement group, citing official statistics.

Anything built without a permit, from home extensions to tents, animal pens and irrigation networks, is at risk of demolition by the Israeli military.

“If you dig a well, they will come the next day and fill it with concrete," said Hani Saida, a farmer from the town of al-Auja. "They may annex this area, but they will never give us equal rights. They’ll keep trying to drive us away.”

COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees civilian affairs in the West Bank, declined to comment.

Abdul-Malik al-Jaber, a Canadian-Palestinian businessman and the chairman of a large company that exports dates from the Jordan Valley, says the process of obtaining permits is a “nightmare,” even for big investors.

“There’s no way on earth a normal, simple farmer can afford the cost and the complications," he said.

Al-Jaber said his company has spent the last two months and around $35,000 trying to secure a permit to build a modern date-packing plant on land he owns. He was told the Israeli military considers it a training area, even though farmers live there and work the land.

He fears annexation will only make things more difficult, by cutting off workers from the company's fields and factories and further complicating the export process.

Israel's annexation plans have sparked an international outcry, with European and Arab countries warning that it would violate international law and threaten any remaining hopes for a two-state solution.

But in the Jordan Valley and elsewhere in the West Bank the response has been more muted.

“From 1967 until today, water for drinking, water for agriculture, the border, the crossings, the roads, the government lands in Area C between the villages and the cities, the entrances to the towns — all of them are under Israeli control," said Mohannad Saida, a cousin of Hani.

“Nothing is going to change,” he said.

He said his family owns around 750 acres (3 square kilometers) north of al-Auja, stretching to the banks of the Jordan River. They fled during the 1967 war, when Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan and their land was sealed off as a military zone.

Over the years, they would drive into the hills to look down over the land. About 15 years ago, they noticed rows of freshly planted date trees, an extension of a nearby settlement.

A few years later, a relative who worked as a bulldozer driver was able to enter the area for an Israeli construction project. He took pictures of the mud-brick homes where their ancestors had been born and raised.

“We saw our mud houses," Saida said. "They are still standing.”



What to Know about the Tensions between Iran and the US before Their Third Round of Talks

The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
TT
20

What to Know about the Tensions between Iran and the US before Their Third Round of Talks

The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)

Iran and the United States will hold talks Saturday in Oman, their third round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program.

The talks follow a first round held in Muscat, Oman, where the two sides spoke face to face. They then met again in Rome last weekend before this scheduled meeting again in Muscat.

Trump has imposed new sanctions on Iran as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign targeting the country. He has repeatedly suggested military action against Iran remained a possibility, while emphasizing he still believed a new deal could be reached by writing a letter to Iran’s 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to jumpstart these talks.

Khamenei has warned Iran would respond to any attack with an attack of its own.

Here’s what to know about the letter, Iran’s nuclear program and the tensions that have stalked relations between Tehran and Washington since the 1979 revolution.

Why did Trump write the letter? Trump dispatched the letter to Khamenei on March 5, then gave a television interview the next day in which he acknowledged sending it. He said: “I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing.’”

Since returning to the White House, the president has been pushing for talks while ratcheting up sanctions and suggesting a military strike by Israel or the US could target Iranian nuclear sites.

A previous letter from Trump during his first term drew an angry retort from the supreme leader.

But Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term led to face-to-face meetings, though no deals to limit Pyongyang’s atomic bombs and a missile program capable of reaching the continental US.

How did the first round go? Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, hosted the first round of talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The two men met face to face after indirect talks and immediately agreed to this second round in Rome.

Witkoff later made a television appearance in which he suggested 3.67% enrichment for Iran could be something the countries could agree on. But that’s exactly the terms set by the 2015 nuclear deal struck under US President Barack Obama, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew America.

Witkoff hours later issued a statement underlining something: “A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal.” Araghchi and Iranian officials have latched onto Witkoff’s comments in recent days as a sign that America was sending it mixed signals about the negotiations.

Yet the Rome talks ended up with the two sides agreeing to starting expert-level talks this Saturday. Analysts described that as a positive sign, though much likely remains to be agreed before reaching a tentative deal.

Why does Iran’s nuclear program worry the West? Iran has insisted for decades that its nuclear program is peaceful. However, its officials increasingly threaten to pursue a nuclear weapon. Iran now enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels of 60%, the only country in the world without a nuclear weapons program to do so.

Under the original 2015 nuclear deal, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67% purity and to maintain a uranium stockpile of 300 kilograms (661 pounds). The last report by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s program put its stockpile at 8,294.4 kilograms (18,286 pounds) as it enriches a fraction of it to 60% purity.

US intelligence agencies assess that Iran has yet to begin a weapons program, but has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”

Ali Larijani, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, has warned in a televised interview that his country has the capability to build nuclear weapons, but it is not pursuing it and has no problem with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections. However, he said if the US or Israel were to attack Iran over the issue, the country would have no choice but to move toward nuclear weapon development.

“If you make a mistake regarding Iran’s nuclear issue, you will force Iran to take that path, because it must defend itself,” he said.

Why are relations so bad between Iran and the US? Iran was once one of the US’s top allies in the Middle East under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who purchased American military weapons and allowed CIA technicians to run secret listening posts monitoring the neighboring Soviet Union. The CIA had fomented a 1953 coup that cemented the shah’s rule.

But in January 1979, the shah, fatally ill with cancer, fled Iran as mass demonstrations swelled against his rule. The revolution followed, led by Khomeini, and created Iran’s theocratic government.

Later that year, university students overran the US Embassy in Tehran, seeking the shah’s extradition and sparking the 444-day hostage crisis that saw diplomatic relations between Iran and the US severed. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s saw the US back Saddam Hussein. The “Tanker War” during that conflict saw the US launch a one-day assault that crippled Iran at sea, while the US later shot down an Iranian commercial airliner that the American military said it mistook for a warplane.

Iran and the US have see-sawed between enmity and grudging diplomacy in the years since, with relations peaking when Tehran made the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. But Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, sparking tensions in the Middle East that persist today.