"YOU'RE not a village, you’re a national park," says Daniel Halimi, the deputy planning officer of Israel’s occupation administration in the West Bank, addressing a meeting to decide the fate of Nabi Samuel. The hamlet is trapped on a hilltop in the seam between Israel’s separation barrier and the boundaries of the municipality of Jerusalem. For the villagers, the refusal to recognise their village is part of a plan to erase their protest. They walk out of the meeting in Beit El, a Jewish settlement, on November 24th, 2013. With views overlooking Jerusalem, Ramallah and the Mediterranean Sea, Nabi Samuel's inhabitants suspect that Israel has been planning their removal since occupying the West Bank in 1967. In the 1970s the army bulldozed most of their homes. In the 1990s the Israeli authorities declared the village a national park and prevented construction or even tree-planting. Now the planning authorities in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Beit El are planning to incorporate the villagers' mosque, built over the supposed shrine of the Biblical Prophet Samuel, into a tourist site emphasising its Jewish ties.

The ruins of the villagers' stone homes are already part of an archaeological site at the base of their mosque, which is cordoned off with rope and an Israeli sign says date back to biblical times. The part of the mosque purportedly housing Prophet Samuel’s shrine has already been turned into a synagogue. An iron door bars access from the prayer-room above. Mr Halimi’s plan includes a road that links Nabi Samuel to a nearby settlement, but peters out at the village. The road says the architect, Rami Margoli, will be lined with artefacts to emphasise its Jewish connection. "The earlier periods are relatively more important than the later ones," he says.

Nabi Samuel's fate is symptomatic of Area C—the 60% of the occupied West Bank which the Oslo Agreement’s interim accords in 1993 left under full Israeli control (although they did stipulate that tourist sites should be handed to the Palestinian Authority). The village should be brimming with tourists. Instead it is sunk in poverty. Its young have already left for easier lives in the city of Ramallah. While the settlement next door expands, natural growth for Palestinians is frozen. Military restrictions ban construction. Even the swingsfinanced by Queen Rania of Jordan have a demolition order. The sole grocer has to bring supplies in the boot of his car, because all commerce is banned. Soldiers stopped a villager, Eid Barakat, bringing in chickens, worried that he might sell eggs. Only the deferential get permits to work from Israel’s intelligence service, the Shabak.

Planning officials say they are preserving the site’s natural and historic beauty. But Israel's military sidesteps such concerns when it parks a huge mast next to the mosque or approves sprawl for settlements whose sewage spills onto Nabi Samuel’s land. Western diplomats have taken to calling the territory Area Sea, not C, as waves of settlers turn Palestinian land into a map of dots, like islands in an archipelago.