Transparency & Accountability
B'Tselem says Israel's bulldozers cut water from 47 Jordan Valley families
Image credit: Khirbet Ibziq, northern Jordan Valley — Aref Daraghmeh / B'Tselem via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · License
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Forty-seven Palestinian families in the northern Jordan Valley are at risk of being pushed off their land, the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem said this week, after the last water pipes reaching them were cut.
The families live in Ras al-Ahmar, at-Tha'ala and the area east of Atuf. B'Tselem counted more than 300 people among them, nearly half of them children, and attributed the water cuts to Israeli settlers working alongside the army.
The organisation described the damage in its own words: bulldozers uprooted olive trees, destroyed crops and greenhouses, and ruined kilometres of water and irrigation lines. B'Tselem dates the damage to digging works that began in March 2026, part of a barrier project it measured at roughly 22 kilometres running through several of these communities.
Bulldozers uprooted olive trees, destroyed crops and greenhouses, ruined kilometres of water and irrigation lines.
B'Tselem, on the northern Jordan Valley communities
What the water means to a herding household#
These are herding and farming communities, and the distinction matters to the finding. A household here keeps sheep and grows on land it reaches by pipe, and the pipes are the reason it can stay through a Jordan Valley summer.
B'Tselem's argument is that the cuts function as displacement whether or not an eviction order is ever signed: a family that cannot water its flock or its fields leaves without being ordered to. The organisation says the pattern serves settlement expansion in the valley, and that the damaged infrastructure now threatens the viability of thousands of dunams of agricultural land.
The army's answer#
The Israeli military gave its account to the Jerusalem Post, which reported the findings and the response together on Tuesday under the bylines of Yonah Jeremy Bob and Jonah Davidov.
Military officials confirmed a digging project in the area and described its purpose as operational control that would make it possible to prevent weapons smuggling and thwart security threats. They cited a dividing wall built in 2023 and past attacks on Israeli families in the valley, naming the Deutsch and Dee families, as the reason for the expanded works.
On the houses themselves the army's position was narrower. Circumstances differ for each family, military sources said, and many of the homes were built without permits in Area C.
That answer describes the planning system rather than resolving the question. Area C covers about 60 percent of the West Bank and remains under full Israeli civil and military control, and United Nations monitoring has for years put Israeli approval of Palestinian building applications there in the low single digits of a percentage point.
A community that cannot obtain a permit is a community whose houses can always be called illegal.
What is not in dispute between the two accounts is the physical fact underneath them. In the middle of August, in the hottest part of the valley, the pipes to three Palestinian communities were cut, and more than 300 people are living without them while the reasons are argued in Jerusalem.
