We are driving to Masafer Yatta.
It's a collection of hamlets and villages home to about a thousand Palestinians.
Life down here has always been pretty difficult.
There's a lot of pressure from both the Israeli army
and Israeli settlers to get people to leave their homes.
But since October 7th, the situation has gotten a lot worse.
The occupied West Bank is divided into three areas: A, B, and C.
Area C is about 60% of [the] territory, and Israel has total military and civilian control there.
The Israeli state has declared parts
of Masafer Yatta as a restricted military training zone.
Israeli settlers still live there, but the government and the army demolished
Palestinian homes and infrastructure.
Settlers also use violence in order
to force the Palestinians to leave.
So we're going to a few of these villages today and we're going to talk to people about what
they're planning to do, whether they're going to stay or whether they're going to leave.
Our first destination is the village of Al-Tiran, a small herding community
located next to what used to be the village of Zanuta.
All 150 residents of Zanuta fled their homes in November.
Generations of the family have lived in Al-Tiran since they were expelled from Al-Tira,
a village in what is now Israel that was destroyed in 1948.
They depend on the land and livestock to support themselves,
since under Israeli law, in Area C, they are not allowed
to build any infrastructure at all.
After 7 October, how has it changed?
The more time we spend in Masafer Yatta,
the more stories we hear of alleged settler violence towards Palestinians
and damage to property, crops and livestock.
As we were filming in the village of Tuba we too spotted drones overhead.
Shortly afterwards three Israeli
soldiers arrived and escorted us out of the village.
We were later released with a warning for entering a restricted army zone.
Israeli settlers have a very different explanation
for how and why events are unfolding in Masafer Yatta.
Masafer Yatta is another name for what is actually technically IDF firing zones.
Live-fire training zones.
At the same time that we were filming in the area,
a tour led by the Regavim movement, a pro-settler campaign group
took journalists to nearby Palestinian villages,
claiming that the buildings should all be destroyed as they were built illegally.
If we drive through the firing zone, you will see
paved roads, masses of schools.
This is how they are living.
All of this is 100%
illegal and made possible by your European tax dollars.
In the recently abandoned village of Zanuta,
the guide refuted any claims of settler violence
being the reason why the Palestinian community had left.
This is one example that is the basis for President Biden's accusations of settler violence.
The vast majority are like this.
There's never any violence. There is no settler violence,
these people just up and left? Correct?
100% correct.
Yeah.
Despite the claims that there is no settler violence,
Palestinians and rights groups have collected hundreds of videos showing settlers using live fire,
physical assaults, intimidation and damage to property and land.
The first time I met 77-year-old Abu Safi
and his family was at their home in the village of Al-Ratheem.
Now, just two months later, they have moved in to his brother's house
in the town of Yatta, abandoning the home they lived in for decades.
When you left home, how did you decide what to take?
What to leave?
This is the Safi family house, one of the two buildings.
When I came here in September,
I had a lovely chat with the family in this room.
It was filled with plants.
It was very neat and tidy.
The extended family was about 30 people,
so they lived in this house and one just over there.
The family left in a hurry.
Obviously, I mean, you can tell by the clothes
and stuff and the furniture that's left, but
somebody has obviously been in here and decided that they're going
to make it uninhabitable and smash it up.
The roof is gone.
The family would have taken the roof because that metal sheeting is expensive,
but everything else is
yeah, not what I expected to find when I came here compared to last time.
They even left the keys in the door.
More than 800 Palestinians have been forced to leave their homes since 7 October,
which is the biggest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank
since Israel was created in 1948.
The Safi family spent generations building a life here,
despite the difficulties posed by the Israeli occupation.
They were determined to fight for their right to remain in this part of Palestine,
but that fight is now over.
And while the world is focused on the war in Gaza, violence and intimidation
from settlers here in the West Bank could mean other families suffer the same fate.