In the summer of 2024, settlers expelled the residents of Khallet Khader, one of five communities making up al-Farisiyah in the northern Jordan Valley. In recent years, six families comprising 28 people, including seven minors, lived in the community. Some spent the summer elsewhere, returning around September or October, at the start of the school year, the agricultural season, or after the end of summer grazing. Other families stayed at the site only during the agricultural season.
In August 2024, on several occasions, settlers arrived at the community’s land, looted, vandalized, and destroyed the residential tents of families who were away for the summer. Following these attacks, and after settlers threatened to steal their flock, the only family that had remained in the community throughout the summer left the area that month. The other families, fearing for their safety, did not return in the fall. Five families relocated to Tubas and one to the town of ‘Ein al-Beida. On 31 March 2025, the Civil Administration demolished the residential compound of one family that had hoped to return to the area. Other compounds that still stand remain under imminent threat of demolition.
As noted, Kahallet Khader was one of five communities comprising the village of al-Farisiyah which lies in the northern Jordan valley and predates the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Khallet Khader itself was located east of Route 578 (Alon Route) on privately owned land belonging to the Daraghmeh family and cultivated by community members and families from Tubas. The community’s northern fields bordered Route 90. In the 1960s, the settlement of Mehola was built just north of the Khallet Khader, and in 2001, it expanded with the addition of the settlement/neighborhood of Giv’at Sal’it, on the other side of Route 578. Over the years, the community suffered repeated harassment by settlers, the Civil Administration, and the Jordan Valley Regional Council.
Some residents lived in Khallet Khader year-round, while others stayed seasonally. During the agricultural season, from October to July, more than twenty families from other localities also stayed at the site to work the fields.