Jordan Valley / PNN Report / S tory By Yara Mansour —
Slowly, Slowly, ʿAisha Ishtayyeh opens the metal gate of the makeshift shack she now calls home in the village of al-Nasariyya. The area is surrounded by settlements and settlers, and this shack has become her forced refuge after she was displaced from her home in al-Hamra, in the northern and central Jordan Valley — a region under constant threat of annexation and settlement expansion, where Israeli policies continue to drive Palestinians from their land.
Experts say Israel seeks full control over the Jordan Valley, which constitutes about 26% of the occupied West Bank and is known as the Palestinians’ “food basket.”
Aisha’s weary steps tell the story of a home she was forced to abandon — and of a life now suspended between displacement and survival. Despite repeated U.S. assurances, including from President Donald Trump that he would not permit Israel to annex the West Bank, Palestinians say Israel’s right-wing government continues to implement annexation policies on the ground.
Watch the story of Aisha on PNN Arabic
Aisha recalls the day she fled her home in haste, clutching only her land deeds and a map of Palestine — symbols of a life torn away in an instant.
Speaking to PNN from al-Nasariyya, Aisha said she was living peacefully in her house in al-Hamra when she went to Nablus for the day. Soon after, her neighbours — fifteen families living nearby — called to tell her they had been attacked by settlers and forced to flee. “The settlers assaulted my husband inside our home,” she said. “They waited until the schoolchildren had left for class, then stormed the house, beat him severely, and sent him to the Turkish Hospital, where he is still being treated.”
Now living in a tin shack on a small plot of family-owned farmland, Aisha describes her life as “beyond difficult.” “They took everything — the cow, the tractor, the solar panels, even the sheep,” she said. “We have nothing left to live on.”
Fighting tears, she added that she has appealed to every possible authority, public and private, for help — but no one has come. “I have knocked on every door,” she said. “No one has recognized my suffering, not even with a single shekel of help.”
The shack, she said, is barely livable. “The furniture is whatever my son can collect from the streets in a broken car. We sit on torn couches; there are no walls, no tiles. The heat from the metal walls is unbearable. Who leaves paradise for fire? We left paradise and went straight into the fire. We live between fire above us and fire below us.”
Aisha said she now owns nothing but the clothes she fled in — and the map of Palestine and the house documents she refused to leave behind, even as armed settlers and soldiers surrounded her home. “When they came to evict us, I told myself I would either die or get the documents,” she said. “A soldier tried to take the map from me and even tried to smash its glass frame, but I held on. It means Palestine — our homeland for which so many have been martyred, wounded, or exiled. I was shot in the leg for Palestine.”
She ended her account by saying that the struggle in the Jordan Valley is not only about land but about existence itself: “It’s a battle between remaining or being erased.”
Silent Annexation Without Declaration
Journalist and Israeli affairs analyst Mohammad Daraghmeh told PNN that settlers are pressuring the right-wing Israeli government to annex the entire West Bank, viewing the current political climate as the “perfect opportunity” to realize their expansionist goals.
He explained that the government is implementing “de facto annexation,” tightening restrictions on Palestinians and preventing the Palestinian Authority from providing basic services. “For the Israeli right,” Daraghmeh said, “if annexation must happen in stages, the first step is the Jordan Valley.”
Unlike other West Bank settlements, he noted, those in the Jordan Valley are primarily agricultural — controlling vast, fertile lands and barring Palestinian farmers from accessing them. “This is practical annexation,” he said. “While American statements sound reassuring, the reality on the ground is the systematic removal of Palestinians from the Valley.”
Daraghmeh emphasized that the ongoing displacement is not coincidental but part of a deliberate plan to establish new settler outposts and consolidate Israeli presence “at the expense of Palestinian life and land.”
“The story of ʿAisha Ishtayyeh,” he said, “is not an isolated tragedy — it is a living example of Israel’s silent annexation of the Jordan Valley.”
