Vulnerable People Project Condemns Settler Encroachment on Land Owned by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem Near Tayasir and Hammam al-Malih and Calls for Its Immediate Protection
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The Vulnerable People Project (VPP)
Aug. 7, 2026
BEIRUT, LEBANON, Aug. 7, 2026 /Standard Newswire/ — Israeli settlers are continuing to erect fences along the main road near Tayasir and Hammam al-Malih, in the Tubas Governorate of the northern West Bank, blocking access to land belonging to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The Vulnerable People Project (VPP) strongly condemns the encroachment on Catholic Church property and the wider seizure of Palestinian land in the northern Jordan Valley, and calls for the immediate protection of both.
According to local officials, settlers have brought fencing equipment and begun sealing off tracts of land east of the Tayasir checkpoint and in the Hammam al-Malih area — some of it privately owned by Palestinian residents, and much of it belonging to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Mahdi Daraghmeh, head of the al-Malih and Bedouin communities’ village council, said the fencing will cut residents off from thousands of dunams of land, choking access to grazing and farmland that families in this Bedouin-populated stretch of the Jordan Valley depend on to survive.
The encroachment is not new, and it is not incidental. The Latin Patriarchate publicly condemned settler violations of this same property earlier this year, and in April 2026 its Endowment Department met with Israeli military authorities and the Civil Administration and filed a formal, documented legal complaint over attacks on Church land and on local residents — after which authorities reportedly began pursuing those responsible and seized heavy machinery used to destroy the land. Settlers had targeted the Patriarchate’s Tayasir holdings before, including a mass incursion onto the property in which they grazed livestock and marched across Church land in open defiance of its ownership. The renewed fencing marks an escalation of that long campaign — an attempt to convert repeated trespass into a permanent wall.
“When settlers can fence off land that belongs to the Catholic Church itself and lock both Palestinians and the Patriarchate out of it, no one should pretend this is a private dispute over a few fields,” said Jason Jones, founder of the Vulnerable People Project. “This is the same method we have watched swallow village after village in the West Bank — a fence today, an outpost tomorrow, and a family cut off from the land that fed it the day after. That it is now Church land in the Jordan Valley should remove any doubt about how far this campaign reaches. The Latin Patriarchate has followed every lawful channel. The world owes it more than silence in return.”
The fencing forms part of a broader drive to consolidate settler control across the Jordan Valley — sealing off Palestinian access, entrenching outposts, and reshaping the land in ways that rights groups and Church leaders alike have described as contributing to a de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank, contrary to international law. The transfer of an occupying power’s population onto occupied land, and the appropriation of private and ecclesiastical property, are prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The Vulnerable People Project calls on diplomatic missions, the Holy See, church leaders, and the international community to stand with the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, to demand the removal of the fences and the restoration of access for the land’s Palestinian and ecclesiastical owners, and to insist on real protection and accountability before another stretch of the Holy Land is fenced away from the people and the Church to whom it belongs.
For more information about the Vulnerable People Project and its mission to Save West Bank Christians, please visit SaveWestBankChristians.com.
PRESS CONTACT: Madison Eviston, +1 (210) 897-6809
ABOUT JASON JONES & THE VULNERABLE PEOPLE PROJECT:
Jason Jones is a film producer, author, activist, and human rights worker. He is president of Movie to Movement, the Human Rights Education Organization (H.E.R.O.) and founder of the Vulnerable People Project. The Vulnerable People Project advocates for persecuted communities around the world, with a focus on exposing human rights abuses and supporting vulnerable individuals regardless of faith or background.
SOURCE The Vulnerable People Project (VPP)