Stand at the edge of Fasayil, a small Palestinian village in the northern Jordan Valley, and the geometry of occupation becomes legible in the landscape itself. Date palms cluster around the village’s modest homes. A few hundred metres away, the fences of an Israeli agricultural settlement begin — greenhouses stretching toward the Jordan River, served by roads the village residents cannot use. Beyond the river: Jordan. In every other direction: Area C, the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli military and civil control, where Palestinian construction permits are almost never granted and where settlement expansion has continued, without pause, for more than five decades.
The Jordan Valley is not a footnote to the occupation. It is, in many ways, its sharpest edge.
What the Jordan Valley Is — and What It Represents
The Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea shore together constitute approximately 28–30 percent of the West Bank’s total land area, running roughly 120 kilometres along the territory’s eastern spine. Israeli governments have long regarded the region as a strategic asset — a “security border” — and have governed it accordingly. Since 1967, the Israeli military has declared large portions of the valley as closed military zones, firing zones, or nature reserves, systematically restricting Palestinian access to land that Palestinian families had farmed for generations.
The result is a stark demographic asymmetry. According to figures cited by OCHA oPt, approximately 65,000 Palestinians live in the Jordan Valley, many of them Bedouin and herding communities. Facing them, across a web of settler-only roads, are roughly 11,000 Israeli settlers living in more than 30 settlements and outposts. Those settlers, a fraction of the Palestinian population, control the overwhelming majority of the valley’s agricultural land and water resources.
Water is not a secondary issue here. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has documented that Palestinians in the Jordan Valley are permitted to draw on a fraction of the water available to nearby settlements. In some communities, residents pay several times more per cubic metre for water delivered by tanker than settlers pay through metered connections to the national grid — a disparity that makes commercial agriculture nearly impossible and pushes families toward departure.
The Settlement Clusters: Agriculture as Territorial Control
Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley differ from those in the West Bank’s hill country in one significant respect: they are primarily agricultural rather than suburban. Clusters such as those around Mehola, Masua, and Ro’i in the north, and Mitzpe Shalem and Kalya near the Dead Sea in the south, produce dates, vegetables, and minerals for export — including to European markets. The settlement enterprise here is not mainly about housing; it is about control of the valley’s fertile soil and its water.
This agricultural character has made the settlements unusually entrenched. Infrastructure investments — irrigation systems, packing houses, roads — are not easily abandoned. Palestinian villages like Al-Jiftlik, Bardala, and Ein al-Beida exist in and around this settler agricultural matrix, their residents restricted from expanding onto surrounding land even as settlement infrastructure expands around them.
Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights, an Israeli organisation that monitors planning policy in the West Bank, has shown that Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley are confined to extraordinarily small building envelopes, with master plans either absent or decades out of date. The practical effect is that families cannot build legally to accommodate natural population growth, while adjacent settlement regional councils plan expansions measured in thousands of dunams.
Bedouin Communities Under Sustained Pressure
Among the most vulnerable residents of the Jordan Valley are its Bedouin and pastoralist communities — dozens of small hamlets, some without formal recognition, whose residents rely on grazing and small-scale herding. OCHA oPt has tracked demolition orders and forced displacement events in the valley for years. Structures described by Israeli authorities as “illegal” — tents, animal pens, water cisterns — are demolished repeatedly, sometimes within days of being rebuilt.
Communities such as Khirbet Humsa al-Fawqa have become emblematic of this pressure. In November 2020, Israeli forces demolished the entire community — homes, animal shelters, solar panels, water tanks — displacing more than 70 people, including children, in a single day. OCHA called it one of the largest single displacement events in the West Bank in years. The demolition was carried out during a period when the Jordan Valley’s political status was the subject of active international debate — which is to say, it was not incidental timing.
The Annexation Pledge: Netanyahu, Trump, and a Line That Was Almost Drawn
In September 2019, campaigning for re-election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that if returned to office he would apply Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea — essentially annexing the region. It was not a new idea; Israeli politicians across the spectrum had spoken of the valley as non-negotiable for decades. But the political context had changed.
In January 2020, the Trump administration released its “Peace to Prosperity” plan — widely known as the Trump plan or the “Deal of the Century.” The plan proposed that Israel retain the Jordan Valley, along with all existing settlements throughout the West Bank, as part of a future agreement. It was the first time a U.S. administration had formally endorsed the annexation of occupied Palestinian territory, departing from decades of official American policy grounded in UN Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967.
The coalition agreement signed between Netanyahu’s Likud and Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party in April 2020 included a provision allowing the government to bring annexation legislation to the Knesset from July 1, 2020. That date passed without a formal vote, partly because of opposition from Jordan — whose 1994 peace treaty with Israel is bound up with the valley’s status — and partly because of diplomatic signalling from European governments that annexation would trigger serious consequences. The Abraham Accords, normalisation agreements between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain brokered in August–September 2020, were accompanied by a public Israeli commitment to “suspend” annexation, though no formal renunciation was made.
The legal scholar Noura Erakat noted in the period’s analysis that “suspension” is not abandonment — that the infrastructure of annexation, including settlement expansion, road-building, and the denial of Palestinian building rights, continued regardless of whether a formal declaration was made. On the ground, in places like Fasayil and Khirbet Humsa, the distinction between de facto and de jure annexation can feel academic.
What Remains
The annexation vote did not happen. But the conditions that made it conceivable remain entirely intact. Settlements continue to expand. Demolition orders continue to be issued. Palestinian communities continue to shrink — not through a single dramatic act but through the accumulated pressure of permit denials, water restrictions, road closures, and the steady encroachment of settlement infrastructure.
The Jordan Valley is, as Palestinian geographers and negotiators have long argued, the territorial question that determines whether a contiguous Palestinian state is physically possible. Without it, any future Palestinian entity would be landlocked not only from the sea but from its own eastern boundary — enclosed on all sides. That is not a distant hypothetical. It is the present condition of the 65,000 Palestinians who already live there.
Sources
- OCHA oPt — humanitarian reporting on Jordan Valley demolitions and displacement, including Khirbet Humsa al-Fawqa (2020)
- B’Tselem — “Acting the Landlord: Israel’s Policy in Area C” and water access documentation in the Jordan Valley
- Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights, reports on Palestinian planning rights in Area C and the Jordan Valley
- UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967)
- Trump administration, “Peace to Prosperity” plan (January 2020)
- Likud–Blue and White coalition agreement (April 2020), annexation provisions
- Noura Erakat — public legal commentary and scholarship on annexation and international law
- Peace Now — settlement data and mapping, Jordan Valley settlements
