By Ali Sawafta and James Mackenzie

BARDALA, West Bank (Reuters) - Just metres from the last houses in Bardala, a Palestinian village at the northern end of the occupied West Bank, Israel's army has been bulldozing a dirt road and ditch between the community and open grazing land on the hills behind it.

Israel's military told Reuters the works were for security and to allow it to patrol the area following the killing of an Israeli civilian in August near the village by a man from another town. It did not detail what it was building there. 

Farmers from the fertile Jordan Valley village fear the army patrols and Israeli settlers moving in will exclude them from pastures that feed around 10,000 sheep and goats, as has happened in other parts of the West Bank, undercutting their livelihoods and eventually driving from the village. 

Israeli settler outposts have appeared around the village since last year, with clusters of blue and white Israeli flags newly fluttering from nearby hilltops. The settlers intimidated semi-nomadic Bedouin shepherds to abandon their camps in the area last year, four Bedouin families and Israeli human rights NGOs told Reuters.  

The tighter military control in the Jordan Valley and arrival of settler outposts in the area over the past months are new developments in a part of the West Bank that had mostly avoided the build up of Israel's presence on the ground in central areas of the Palestinian territory. 

With each advance of Israeli settlements and roads, the territory becomes more fractured, further undermining prospects for a contiguous land on which Palestinians could build a sovereign state. Most countries consider Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank to be illegal.

Over recent weeks, caravans and shelters have begun appearing on the scrub-covered hills a few hundred metres west of Bardala, on land behind the new track, Reuters reporters saw. Such temporary shelters have been the first signs of new outposts being built.

Reuters was unable to contact any of the new arrivals in the outposts around the village.

Ibrahim Sawafta, a member of the Bardala village council, said two dozen farmers would be prevented from reaching grazing land if soldiers and settler outposts obstruct their free movement. Unable to keep their large flocks in pens within the village itself, they would be forced to sell.

"Bardala would be a small prison," he said, sitting on a bench outside his house in the village.

He said the overall goal was "to restrict people, to force them to leave the Jordan Valley."

In response to Reuters questions, the army said the area behind the dirt road outside Bardala was designated as a live fire zone but included "a passage" manned by Israeli soldiers, suggesting limitations on free movement in the area. 

It said the passage would allow for "the continuation of daily life and the fulfilment of residents' needs," without giving further details.

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as the Yesha Council and the Jordan Valley Council, that represent settlers in the West Bank did not reply to requests for comment for this story. 

Sawafta said gunmen had been known to come into the area from towns to the west and the barrier appeared intended to make access more difficult and force traffic through main roads with security checkpoints under Israeli control. 

But he said the effect of the move would be to obstruct access to the land, which in some cases was owned by villagers. 

The activity around Bardala is part of a wider Israeli effort to reshape the West Bank. Over the year and a half since war broke out in Gaza, settlement activity has accelerated in areas seen as the core of a future Palestinian state.    

Meanwhile, Israel's pro-settler politicians have been emboldened by the return to the White House of Donald Trump who has already proposed that Palestinians leave Gaza, a suggestion widely condemned across the Middle East and beyond as an attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinian territories.

In recent weeks, army raids in refugee camps near volatile West Bank cities, including Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas, near Bardala, have sent tens of thousands of people fleeing their homes, fuelling fears of permanent displacement. 

The raids come amid a renewed push to formally absorb the West Bank as part of Israel, a proposal supported by some of U.S. President Donald Trump's aides. Israel's military has occupied the West Bank since the 1967 Middle East war. 

CORNFIELDS AND GREENHOUSES

Bardala, with a population of about 3,000, lies a few metres from the pre-1967 line separating the West Bank from Israel. It prospered quietly over the past 30 years as Israel's settlement movement swallowed up thousands of hectares of land in other parts of the West Bank.

The cornfields and clusters of plastic-sheeted greenhouses where its farmers grow aubergines, peppers and zucchini for the markets of the West Bank and Israel underscore how fertile the land is in the narrow strip of valley alongside the Jordan River, running from the Dead Sea north towards the Sea of Galilee.

But the new Israeli-controlled path will squeeze the village against Highway 90, a road that runs north-south along the riverine border with Jordan from the Dead Sea. Highway 90 ends at the separating line between the West Bank and Israel, just outside the village. The separating line is marked by a high fence.

Citing the experience of other villages, Dror Etkes, founder of Israeli rights group Kerem Navot, said the new track and settlement activity would block access for Palestinians to the area north of Bardala, "all the way up to the separation barrier." Kerem Navot tracks Israeli settlement and land management policy in the West Bank. 

The authorities "will take a few thousand dunhams, mainly of agricultural land and prevent the Palestinians from cultivating this land," he said. A dunham is a tenth of a hectare.

ANNEXATION FEARS

The West Bank, so named because of its relation to the river that separates it from Jordan, has long been seen by religious nationalist hardliners in Israel as part of a Greater Israel through historical and Biblical connections to the Jewish people.

Jewish settlement building has roared ahead under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and allies in government such as hardline Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, who said last year he would push to gain Washington's support for annexation in 2025. 

Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said at the time that the government's position on annexation had not yet been settled. Israel's opposition to ceding control of the West Bank has been deepened by its fears of a repeat of the October 7, 2023 attack near Gaza.

Since the start of the war in Gaza, 43 new outposts, the seeds of future settlements, have been built in the West Bank, according to Peace Now, an Israeli organization that tracks settlement building. 

Most are farm outposts that exclude Palestinians from agricultural land. At least seven were built in the Jordan Valley, according to Palestinian Authority figures.

As in other areas of the West Bank, Palestinians and rights groups say the arrival of outposts coincided with more violence from bands of settlers, now free of the fear of U.S. sanctions since Trump cancelled penalties imposed under former President Joe Biden for previous violence.

For months, Bedouins living in semi-permanent stockades in the hills grazing sheep and goats around the Jordan Valley have been subjected to harassment by violent groups of settlers. In late January, the local school in Bardala itself was attacked, after the settlers said stones had been thrown at them.  

"The settlers would attack us every Saturday, not allowing us to leave the house at all," said Mahmoud Kaabneh, who left his home in Um Aljmal, an area in the hills some 20 km south of Bardala for Tubas, along with a dozen other families after repeated incursions by threatening bands of settlers.

The creation in 2023 of the Settlements Administration, a civil department for the West Bank answerable to Smotrich, has fuelled Palestinian concern that the move from military occupation to annexation is already happening by stealth.

In his first term, Trump overturned decades of U.S. policy by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

But he has not so far given U.S. approval to the calls for full annexation, which could be an obstacle to one of his main foreign policy goals, a security pact with Saudi Arabia that could include normalizing relations with Israel in an expansion of the so-called Abraham Accords.

Extending Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank would end already slim hopes of creating an independent Palestine alongside Israel, which Saudi Arabia has declared to be a non-negotiable condition for normalizing relations.

But Trump's talk of redeveloping Gaza as a U.S.-controlled waterfront resort, along with his aides' ties to the settler movement, has alarmed Palestinians, still haunted by the "Nakba," or catastrophe, in the 1948 war at the start of the state of Israel, when some 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes and never returned.

For Sawafta, from the Bardala village council, developments like the one in his home village point to an effort to dispossess Palestinians in the way their parents and grandparents were dispossessed before. 

"Israel effectively and practically confiscates the land," he said.

(Reporting by James Mackenzie and Ali Sawafta; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)