Jihad Suleiman Al-Sawafta, 46, has lived on his farm in the occupied West Bank village of Bardala his entire life. But when Israeli settlers showed up in December, Al-Sawafta said his land, and his livelihood, shrank to a fraction of its former self.

“They crowded the area. They took thousands of dunams (1,000 square meters) from Bardala and its grazing lands,” he said, referring to his Palestinian town in the northern part of the West Bank. He added that the Jordan Valley, a fertile strip of land long considered the West Bank’s breadbasket, had been “largely emptied”of its Palestinian residents.

Herding outposts like the one set up on Al-Sawafta’s land are often established by Israeli settlers on hilltops with a few caravans and sometimes livestock to mark their claim. Monitoring groups say they are notorious for swallowing up vast swathes of land and prohibiting Palestinian residents from moving freely. The outposts are illegal under both Israeli and international law, and the state is not allowed to finance or build on them.

The number of Israeli herding outposts has dramatically increased since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition took power in 2022 on a platform of settlement expansion. The government includes ministers who are themselves settlers and want to annex the occupied territory to Israel. In the wake of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, which triggered Israel’s invasion of Gaza, settlers have accelerated land grabs with support from the state.

Peace Now and Kerem Navot estimate that shepherding outposts, occupied by a few hundred settlers, now cover almost 14% of the West Bank. Some of the unauthorized outposts are run by extremist Israeli settlers and settler groups that were sanctioned under the Biden administration, according to the monitoring groups.

Of the total land seized by settlers in the West Bank since the 1990s using herding outposts, 70% has been taken in the last two and half years alone, the report found.

‘Empowered to do whatever they want’

There is no official planning approval for outposts, unlike officially recognized Jewish settlements, which tend to be larger, more organized urban developments. Settlements are considered illegal under international law and by much of the international community, but Israel disputes that.

For Palestinians living near the outposts, their expansion in recent years has often meant losing access to their land and natural resources, as roads, fences, and settler activity gradually cut them off.

The land grabs have gone hand-in-hand with an escalation in violence by Israeli security forces and settlers against Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank.

Israel’s defense minister said at the end of February that he had instructed the military to “prevent the return of residents” who had been displaced by Israel’s military operations in four refugee camps in the northern part of the territory beginning January 21. The United Nations estimated that some 40,000 have been forced to flee their homes.

There are also mounting concerns among Palestinians that US President Donald Trump may endorse annexation of the occupied territory, which is home to more than 3 million Palestinians. “We’re discussing that with many of your representatives,” Trump said in a joint press conference with Netanyahu in Washington, DC, in February. “People do like the idea, but we haven’t taken a position on it yet.”

His proposal for Gaza to be emptied of its inhabitants and developed have raised alarm among rights groups and Palestinian communities, who worry a similar rhetoric could be applied to the occupied West Bank.

Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967. It annexed East Jerusalem, which is also considered occupied under international law, in 1980.

According to the report from Peace Now and Kerem Navot, more than 60 Palestinian shepherding communities have been forcibly displaced since July 2022 – the majority of these since October 7.

“The idea behind it is clear, it is to take the open areas in the West Bank to make sure Palestinians cannot access them, and eventually to hand them over to Israeli settlers.”

In July last year, the United Nations’ top court said Israel should end its decades-long occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, evacuating settlers from the territories designated for a future Palestinian state and halting any new settlement activity. Israel’s foreign minister at the time rejected the non-binding ruling as “fundamentally wrong” and one-sided.

Despite outposts being illegal even under Israeli law, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said there is a “consistent pattern of Israeli authorities’ involvement, assistance and financing of the construction of outposts, as well as their operation.”

Documents uncovered by Peace Now last year showed how the Israeli government has budgeted millions to protect the small, unauthorized farms. The monitoring group said the money paid for vehicles, drones, cameras, generators, electric gates, light poles, solar panels and fences.

The Israeli government approved 75 million shekels ($21 million) in December 2023 for providing security in the West Bank to what it called “young settlements.” Orit Strock, the Minister of Settlements and National Mission, told the Associated Press that the funds were coordinated with the Defense Ministry and “carried out in accordance with all laws.”

Israeli law affords the WZO semi-governmental status, giving it authority “for the development and settlement of the country.” The WZO’s Settlement Division, which describes itself as an “arm of the Israeli state” and is funded by Israeli public money, is responsible for managing the allocation of land to “form and strengthen the settlement of Jews in periphery areas, by increasing the hold on the lands of the country that were passed onto the division by the government of Israel,” according to its website.

Most of the land seized by settlers for illegal shepherding outposts is not classified as Israeli state land, according to mapping data from the Israeli Civil Administration analyzed by Peace Now and Kerem Navot. Nearly 60% of the land, around 470 square kilometers, is either privately owned by Palestinians, has unclear ownership, or falls within Palestinian Authority territory, the report said.

Daraghma said that settlers regularly chase away his sheep and terrorize the community’s children late into the night. “They threaten us that if we go up to this mountain there, they will come to us at night. They say, ‘If you go here, we will come to take your children,’” he said.

A few weeks later, he said his family was forced to flee.

In the rural town of Petersham, Massachusetts, 78-year-old Peter George keeps 1,000 fish in his basement.

“Baseball, sex, fish,” he says, listing his life’s great loves. “My single greatest attribute is that I am passionate about things. That sort of defines me.”

All of George’s fish are endangered Rift Lake cichlids: colorful, freshwater fish native to the Great Lakes of East Africa. Inside his 42 tanks, expertly squeezed into a single subterranean room, the fish shimmer under artificial lights, knowing nothing of the expansive waters in which their ancestors once swam, thousands of miles away.

Due to pollution, climate change and overfishing, freshwater fish are thought to be the second most endangered vertebrates in the world. In Lake Victoria, a giant lake shared between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, over a quarter of endemic species, including countless cichlids, are either critically endangered or extinct.

But for some species, there is still hope. A community of rare fish enthusiasts collect endangered species of freshwater fish from the lakes and springs of East Africa, Mexico and elsewhere, and preserve them in their personal fish tanks in the hope that they might one day be reintroduced in the wild.

“I’m a hard ass,” George says. “There is hope.”

Insurance

George has been collecting fish since 1948 when, as a four-year-old in the Bronx, he would look after his grandmother’s rainbow fish. He soon developed “multiple tank syndrome” – a colloquial term used by fish collectors to denote the spiral commonly experienced after acquiring one’s first tank, which involves the sufferer buying many more tanks within a short space of time. He has not stopped collecting since.

Now, George sees himself as a conservationist; his tanks contain what is known as “insurance populations” – populations of endangered fish that are likely to go extinct in their natural habitats. He believes that when the time is right, they can be taken from his collection and returned to their homes. “I would never accept the fact that they couldn’t be reintroduced,” he says.

Other fish collectors aren’t so bullish. “God bless those people that think that we can reintroduce these fish,” says Pam Chin, owner of 2,000 cichlids kept in her custom “fish house,” and founder of “Babes in the Cichlid Hobby,” a group representing the tiny minority of women collectors, “but my past experience with it was not successful.”

Chin was involved in a reintroduction effort for a cichlid species in Lake Malawi in 2019, but she says logistical obstacles have meant that no one has returned to see if the population survived. Soon after reintroducing them into the lake, Chin saw the same fish pop up on the European fish collectors’ market.

“You bring the population back and the collectors just go back in and collect it up,” she says, frustrated. And that’s on top of legal restrictions around reintroduction, she explains, as well as the possibility that the old habitats are now too polluted, taken over by other fish, or destroyed. Many freshwater fish are highly endemic; the entire range of a species is often as small as a football field. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Other reintroductions have had, according to Chin, “questionable” levels of success.

However, along with Babes in the Cichlid Hobby, Chin has raised more than $200,000 for cichlid conservation. “A species in a tank is better than no species at all,” she says. “Because still, in the back of our hearts, we hope someday that they could be reintroduced.”

Hope

Michael Köck is at the forefront of reintroducing goodeids, an endangered freshwater fish found in Mexico, and founder of the Goodeid Working Group (GWG), a worldwide collaboration between fish hobbyists and scientists.

Formerly an aquarium curator in Vienna, Köck now lives and works in Mexico, on the frontline of the goodeids’ fight for survival.

Behind big round glasses, he recalls his youth when he would wander the forests of Austria, encountering springs bursting with biodiversity. “I just want to keep part of the paradise that I had when I was a child,” he says.

He believes he is on the way to achieving his goal. Köck, along with Chester Zoo in England and Michoacana University in Mexico, is behind what he says is the world’s only successful reintroduction of goodeids from captive populations – that of the Tequila splitfin, a small, gray fish with a bright orange lining on its tail. In 2021, Köck’s project became the first-ever successful reintroduction in Mexico of a fish classified as extinct in the wild, and the GWG has since been involved in reintroductions of other freshwater fish elsewhere in the country. Köck is in the process of replicating the process with more species.

“We have a recipe for bringing one species back,” Köck says. “We can change the course of the planet. We can turn the wheel around and make it a place where kids can go to swim in a river that’s full of native fish.”

It’s a message echoed by the institutions with whom Köck, and his team of hobbyists, work.

“There are species that would have become extinct if they had not been maintained by dedicated individuals and zoos,” says Becky Goodwin, aquarist at Chester Zoo.
“(But) any individual, whether it is a person at home or an institution, doesn’t have the capacity to hold viable and healthy populations alone. This is why larger collaborations are so important.”

All Köck needs, he says, is for other fish collectors to hold firm, and to collaborate with dedicated institutions when the time is right. “There’s always hope,” he insists.
“At the moment it’s not possible (to reintroduce all the fish), but keep them as long as possible, and in the future there will be a chance.”

Motivation

With emotion clear in his voice, Michael Tobler, a goodeid collector in St Louis, Missouri, comes closest to explaining why the resolve of the community is so strong. “They’re like a friend,” he says of his fish, “I don’t want them to go.”

And then there are the human connections found in online forums and annual conventions, where animated conversations about fish stretch long into the night. Collectors exchange childhood memories of their grandmothers’ fish tanks, or the time they spent in forests and creeks, where springs were rich with wildlife. And, above all, they discuss their hope for the future – the same hope cultivated by conservationists of every animal, from the mightiest rhino to the smallest, grayest fish: that one day their species will be back in the wild.

“You just have to control what you can control,” says George. “I get satisfaction out of being able to do what I can do rather than focusing on the frustrations of not being able to do pretty much anything else.”

So, when he wakes on another Massachusetts morning, George descends the stairs to his basement and spends the next few hours tending to his fish in their glass tanks – feeding them, purifying their water, ensuring their species never die. And the same daily process is undergone by thousands of collectors around the world – all patiently biding their time.

“It’s really weird to get infatuated with tiny little gray fish, right?” Tobler says. “But luckily some people do.”