Umm al-Khair, Occupied West Bank — Weddings in Umm al-Khair took on a solemn tone this week, as the community marked Indigenous Peoples’ Day amid ongoing settler violence and land dispossession, according to Al Jazeera. The small Bedouin village, located in Masafer Yatta, was marrying off two of its sons, but residents said the joy of the occasion was tempered by grief and fear. The community continues to endure daily settler attacks, arrests, and incursions by Israeli soldiers, while the threat of further demolitions looms.

Wedding celebrations subdued due to settler presence

Residents said it did not feel right coming so soon after the first anniversary of the killing of Umm al-Khair activist and community leader Awdah Hathaleen, allegedly by Israeli settler Yinon Levi. During celebrations, families spread out in different areas rather than gathering in one place, wary of drawing any attention that has, in the past, brought soldiers to disrupt the festivities.

“There is a wedding, but they are not letting us celebrate quietly,” said Tariq Hathaleen, an English teacher and community leader in Umm al-Khair. On Thursday, the first day of the wedding, Shimon Atiya, an Israeli settler behind the illegal outpost of Havat Shorashim, established roughly 800 metres from the village in 2022 — crashed the wedding in the only style he knows. He brought his livestock to graze in a resident’s vegetable garden, escorted by Israeli soldiers who stood by as it happened.

Land disputes and settler violence persist

When villagers told the soldiers that the plot is recognised as Umm al-Khair land, they were told the maps had changed; when they asked to see the new maps, they were refused. That night, the outpost’s fence towards the village homes was torn down, a prelude to pushing the boundary further in, residents believe. Hathaleen says the settlers’ timing was a reaction to Levi’s indictment days earlier, one of the few times an Israeli has been charged with the killing of a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank since October 2023.

Just a couple of days before, on Thursday, Hathaleen watched as buildings and vehicles in the nearby Palestinian community of Khirbet Tuba were set ablaze by settler arsonists. “The occupation always tried very hard to erase the Palestinian Indigenous people and their history, their legacy, their heritage,” Tariq said. “This really reminds me of the Nakba, and how the Israelis destroyed Palestinian cities and villages,” he noted, even planting cactus over the ruins to bury the evidence. “Back then it wasn’t documented. Nowadays, it’s happening, but it is documented.”

Indigenous rights and land dispossession

Sunday marks the United Nations’ International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, and In Umm al-Khair, the wedding felt symbolic of the threats to Indigenous Palestinians’ way of life and their basic presence on their own land. According to local Palestinians and watchdog NGOs, the threats facing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip include detentions, killings, demolitions, restrictions on movement, and evictions.

Since October 2023, Israel has killed 1,100 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including 242 minors, according to the Israeli NGO B’Tselem. Israel has also demolished more than 3,000 Palestinian homes since October 2023, the vast majority due to a lack of Israeli-issued permits that Palestinians in Area C are routinely denied. According to the latest figures from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), demolitions and settler violence displaced an average of 17 people a day this year, double the rate of the previous three years.

A June report by the West Bank Protection Consortium, which includes the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and monitors more than 200 communities it judges at risk of forcible transfer, said 96 percent of those who had been forcibly displaced were previously dependent on farming or herding. They have mostly lost access to these lands or pastures. However, residents and watchdogs say such dispossession takes place within a system of Israeli permits, demolition orders, and land policies controlled by the state alongside hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding for settlements and outposts.

Israeli NGO Peace Now counts 146 illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and 390 unauthorised outposts and farms, though In 2024, the International Court of Justice found Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful. Amid dispossession of their traditional grazing lands, 13 structures in Umm al-Khair were issued demolition notices last October, following demolitions in 2024 that left a third of the village homeless. The restraining order against Atiya, residents say, has done little to stop him.

Tariq argues the erasure is not only physical, but cultural also, and that it comes paired with an attempt by settlers to claim the very Palestinian identity they are displacing. “The settlers nowadays try to imitate that lifestyle, building tents that they probably stole from Palestinians somewhere, using tractors to bring water from far away,” he said. Young men from the hilltop outposts can be seen grazing camels, goats, and sheep, but all the while, Tariq observes them wearing Palestinian scarves and even attempting the Bedouin dialect when leading their own flocks.

“They know the Indigenous people of this land are the Bedouins and other Palestinians. So, they try to imitate that — to show to themselves and to the world that they are the Indigenous people of this land,” he added. “[But] this land doesn’t relate to them, because only the Indigenous people of this land know how to live in this land.”