The Israeli authorities’ decision to shift the Hamra Checkpoint east of the West Bank towards the village of Ein Shibli is being viewed by local Palestinian farmers as a further chapter in the systematised displacement of their livelihoods. Bulldozers are already clearing land at the village entrance, signalling the confiscation of territory and the imposition of tighter movement controls under the guise of security.

For generations, the Jordan Valley’s cultivators have accessed fields across borders of control; now they face a reality in which roughly 5,000 dunams of land risk being severed behind the new checkpoint. Farmers say they will be forced to pass through a new permanent installation, not merely a barrier, thus placing their day-to-day survival under the direct jurisdiction of an occupying force. One village official warns that the delay and congestion expected once the lane for exits is permanently closed will not simply create inconvenience, it will discourage farm-work, allow arable land to dry up, and drive residents to abandon the region entirely.

Villagers draw a painful parallel with the days of wide-scale displacement and economy-shattering restrictions during earlier eras of conflict. They fear the checkpoint, once relocated, will be officially transformed into a border crossing of sorts, permitting only those who live, hold registered land or possess permits to go and come. Another feared outcome: commercial agriculture will be rendered unviable, as goods delays, forced unloading and re-routing echo the fate of other peripheral crossings in the West Bank.  In the absence of meaningful resistance to escalating dispossession, they say the process is not incidental but integral to a broader agenda of demographic engineering.