For seven months, Israeli settlers have besieged three Palestinian homes on a hilltop near Nablus, but the families refuse to leave. “We will lose ourselves if we lose Ras al-Ain,” a village leader told Mondoweiss.

Settler violence and army raids are erasing the West Bank village of al-Mughayyir. In recent months, villagers have seen a teenager killed defending his neighbors, thousands of olive trees uprooted, and nearly all the village’s lands stolen.

Twelve Palestinian families in the northern West Bank have barricaded themselves in their homes to protect against ongoing settler attacks as Israel moves to assert total control over the occupied territory.

The “Shami neighborhood project” will ethnically cleanse the Bedouin population of Jerusalem’s eastern wilderness as part of Israel’s plan to take total control over the strategic “Greater Jerusalem” corridor, which would split the West Bank in two.