Nuaman or Khallet an Nu'man (Arabic: النعمان, meaning "Grace"),[2] also written al-Numan/an-Nu'man, is a small village located just north of Beit Sahour in the Palestinian Governorate of Bethlehem.

Nuaman itself is a tiny hamlet, built on a single street, and composed of roughly 25 houses, 13 of which existed, as shown by aerial photos of the period, before 1967.

[5] Palestinians began to develop the hamlet of Nuaman on a windy plateau between Jerusalem and Bethlehem in the 1930s[6] during the period of the British Mandatory Government of Palestine.

The area was planted with pine breaks, cypress groves, lemon and olive orchards, and vegetable plots, and, in addition they maintained a pastoral economy of grazing sheep.

[10] In 1967, when Israel occupied of the area, it made a military census[11] that erred, according to B'Tselem, by defining Nuaman's population as residents of the West Bank.

Thirdly, Israel requisitioned some 30 dunams of their land for the Mazmuriya trade terminal (2005), and fourthly, the Jerusalem Ring Road was routed in a way that cut through the hamlet.

Finally, the Israeli Separation Barrier, which the Palestinians call the Apartheid Wall, girds the hamlet,[14] cutting it off from Beit Sahour two hundred yards away.

[6] Altogether the Wall spread over 2.89 km of the Nuaman-Khas village territory, confiscating 776 dunums of arable land and forest, while isolating Nuaman from its sister community.

[20] Bulldozing work on the Separation Wall in May 2006 again uprooted the water mains connections and tore down the only electricity pylon serving the village.

[21] Family members, mothers, grandmothers and children separated by a few hundred metres cannot visit each other in Nuaman if they lack the proper village ID.

[23] Young Nuaman women considering marriage find that their suitors are turned back by Israeli soldiers stationed at the village entrance.

[20] An agreement drawn up by their lawyer, Shlomo Lacker, with the Israeli authorities was endorsed by the court on 22 March 2005, and gave them unimpeded access to the West Bank by law.

[21][29] In December 2005 a labourer from Nuaman, Mahmoud Shawara (43), father of 9 children, living in a roofless structure lacking an Israeli building permit, set out on his mule to look for work in Umm Tuba which is designated as lying within Jerusalem's borders.

Several hours later, the animal was seen dragging something at a gallop, and an Umm Tuba resident stopped it, and saw that an unconscious Shawara had had his hands roped to the mule, and was in a battered state.

Gideon Levy collected testimonies of several Palestinians regarding the practice, which involves placing a cinder block on the prone labourer, once tethered to an animal and then whipping it to drag the person away.

[30] The confiscation order delivered on 2 September 2007, claiming a further 22 dunams of agricultural land, had a notification attached demanding that those living on the expropriated territory leave immediately.

'[3] The villagers themselves are not permitted to truck in heavy supplies like flour, fodder and gas cylinders but are required by the Israeli military to carry them on foot through the checkpoint to their homes 1.5 kilometers away.

[17] The former UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk has endorsed this description, calling the constrictive policies applied to the village an example of "indirect forcible transfer.

According to B'Tselem, behind the restrictions on Nuaman lie a government policy which aims to maintain the demographic balance of Jerusalem by encouraging refusing to allow Palestinians to exceed the ceiling of 30% of the city's population, with measures that include forced expulsions.

[12]Al-Haq claims that what Israel is doing in Nuaman is in clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and International Humanitarian Law, the former prohibiting "individual or mass forcible transfers".