DESTRUCTION of MASAFER YATTA

 

 

So’ed od, a 13-year-old girl, is one of around
1,000 Palestinian residents of the eight villages in
Masafer Yatta—a small region of rugged hills at the
southern edge of the occupied West Bank. So’ed
now spends her days helping her mother look after
their flock of sheep and make cheese in the small village of Sfay, whose name
comes from the Arabic word for “pure.”

So’ed stopped attending class after Israeli bulldozers crushed the village
school. That day, So’ed told us, she helped young children, the students of
lower grades, to escape through the windows. “We were in English class,” she
said. “I saw a Jeep approaching through the window. The teacher stopped the
class. Soldiers arrived with two bulldozers. They closed the doors on us. We
were stuck in the classrooms. Then we escaped through the windows. And they
destroyed the school.”

The destruction of the elementary school took place in November 2022 and
was documented on video. Children in the first, second, and third grades can
be seen in one of the classrooms, screaming and sobbing. Israeli soldiers sur-
rounded the school, where 23 students were enrolled, and threw stun grenades
at villagers who were attempting to block the path of the bulldozers. The
sound of the explosions terrified the trapped students even more. In the videos,
mothers can be seen pulling children out through the classroom windows. Rep-
resentatives from the Israeli Civil Administration, the arm of the military that
governs the occupied territories, entered the emptied school, removed the ta-
les, chairs, and boards from the classrooms, and loaded them
onto a truck, confiscating the items. The Civil Administration
did not respond to our request for comment.

In 1980, the army had declared 30,000 dunams (nearly
7,500 acres) of the residents’ land to be a “firing zone”; the
stated purpose was to remove Palestinians from the area,
which Israel designated for Jewish settlement because of its
strategic proximity to the Green Line marking the border.
In May of last year, a three-judge panel of the Supreme
Court rejected the residents’ appeal against the firing zone,
effectively giving the army permission to continue to displace
the Palestinians from their land. The judge who wrote the
controversial ruling, David Mintz, lives in a West Bank settle-
ment called Dolev, about a 20-minute drive from Ramallah.

The mass expulsion of Masafer Yatta’s residents has not yet
been carried out, but the lives of all the people of these villages
have changed beyond recognition in the months since the
ruling. Soldiers have begun detaining children at impromptu
checkpoints they’ve erected in the middle of the desert under
the cover of night; families watch as bulldozers raze their
homes with increasing frequency; and, right next to the villages
designated for expulsion and demolition, soldiers are already
training with live fire, racing tanks, and detonating mines.

Army officials have stated that plans to carry out the ex-
pulsion order have already been presented to politicians. This
year, with the most right-wing government in Israel’s history
in power––and with its ministers openly calling for mass pop-
ulation transfers and the erasure of Palestinian villages––it’s
very likely that the mass expulsion will actually take place. If
it does, it will be the largest single act of population transfer
carried out in the West Bank since Israel expelled thousands
of Palestinians in 1967, in the early days of the occupation.

Both of us have witnessed the
struggle in Masafer Yatta from up
close. Basel, a journalist and activist,
was born in one of the villages there.
His mother started taking him to
demonstrations against the expulsion
when he was 5. He grew up without
electricity in his home because the
military ordered a blanket ban on cons-

 truction and access to infrastructure
for Palestinians in the area. Over the
past decade, he has been document-
ing the erasure of his community on
video, and his posts have reached mil-
lions of people around the world.

Yuval was born in the city of Be’er
Sheva, a 30-minute drive from Ba-
sel’s house, on the Israeli side of the
Green Line. For the past five years,
he has been reporting on the expulsion
and apartheid in both Hebrew and
English. The two of us work as a team,
mostly for +972 Magazine and the
news site Local Call, and this article is
a product of our collaboration.

Since the court’s rul-
ing last May, Israel has
made the lives of the
families in Masafer Yatta
even more unbearable,
to the point that it’s unclear whether
they will be able to survive there. This
process, however, has been going on
for more than four decades—in what
can best be described as a slow-moving
expulsion. The primary tool Israel uses
is the systematic denial of building

permits. Because Palestinian resi-
dents cannot possibly live in a vil-
lage without houses and other basic
infrastructure—and because any-
thing they build is deemed “illegal”
and summarily demolished—over
time this policy has forced the resi-
dents to leave their land.

Seven days after the ruling, the
military razed the homes of nine
families in Masafer Yatta; 45 people
were left homeless. “It was one of
the worst acts of destruction I have
ever seen,” said Eid Hadlin, a local activist who lives in a
house that has no running water or electricity and is facing a
demolition order.

The bulldozers arrived at Al-Merkaz, one of the villages
designated for expulsion. The soldiers let the residents clear
out their homes. The women carried their personal belong-
ings outside and gathered them into a pile: mattresses, back-
packs, underwear and shirts, shampoo bottles. An inspector
in the Civil Administration looked on until the houses were
emptied. Then he gave the go-ahead, and the bulldozers
wrecked it all.

Najati, a young teenager, sat with his grandmother next
to the pile of debris that was once their home. He was furi-
ous. “The officer told me, as he was demolishing our house:
‘Why bother building? That’s it, finished—this area is now
the army’s for training,’” he said.

One morning, the residents of his village discovered that
soldiers had posted warning signs on their houses overnight.

“You are in a firing zone,” the signs read, in Arabic that was so riddled with
errors that they seemed to have been written with the help of Google Trans-
late. “Entrance is forbidden. Anyone breaking the law can be arrested, fined,
lose their vehicle, which will be confiscated, or can face any other punishment
deemed fitting.” In the following weeks, sol-
diers built a checkpoint between the villages
and confiscated vehicles that passed through
it, under the pretext that driving through a
firing zone is prohibited. And so, gradually,
most of the residents were deprived of their
ability to move freely.

Najati said his family slept outside that
night, under the open sky, and the next day
they cleared the debris and took out a loan
to build another house, in the same spot.
“I’ve lived in Masafer Yatta my whole life,
herding sheep,” said Safa Al-Najar, Najati’s
grandmother, her voice slightly hoarse but
her smile that of a young woman. Her home
was demolished that same day as well. And
so, she said, she’ll sleep in the family’s cave.
“At first, my husband and I lived in this cave,” she said. “This was our bed-
room, and living room, and kitchen—everything together. The sheep lived next
to us in the second cave. But 20 years ago, when my children were grown, we
built a house for them. Everything we built—destroyed.”
According to data from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, since 2016,
soldiers have demolished the homes of 121 families in Masafer Yatta and have
left around 384 people without shelter, many of them children. And it’s not only
houses that are at risk, but all buildings and infrastructure. Pens for the sheep
were also destroyed, water pipes cut, trees felled; even the access roads, which

connect the villages to one another, were de-
stroyed by a huge bulldozer.

At a time when two separate legal proceed-
ings are being brought against Israel at The
Hague—in the International Criminal Court
and the International Court of Justice—Israel
seems eager to avoid the harsh international
condemnation that would inevitably follow
from a brazen population transfer. By expelling
the residents of Masafer Yatta house by house,
Israel can achieve the same goal at a much
smaller cost to its image.

Since the destruction of their
school, children in Sfay have been
attending class in a crumbling
trailer parked on the outskirts of
the village. There are holes in the
roof through which rainwater leaks, and the
bathroom door is a piece of curtain. The army
has forbidden any renovation of the trailer—or
the building of a new school.

So’ed’s village is fairly typical for Masafer
Yatta. Most of its residents are farmers and
shepherds who plant wheat, barley, and olive
trees, make goat cheese, and wake up early in
the morning to bake bread. The area is full of
ancient caves, carved out of the soft white
rocks in the hilly desert by residents many
generations ago. So’ed’s parents lived in the
caves, but they eventually built a house for her
and her siblings.

Families whose homes are demolished by
military bulldozers are forced to live in the
caves, which quickly become overcrowded and
suffocating. Yet the residents
are also forbidden from ren-
ovating the caves, some of
which are already uninhab-
itable.

“We want to build reg-
ular houses, to live above-
ground. Sleeping in a cave
is like sleeping in a grave,”
said Fares Al-Najar, a resi-
dent of Al-Merkaz. Families
who don’t have a cave or who
refuse to accept such living
conditions are forced to ei-
ther leave their community
and lose their land—or build
a new house that will inevitably be demolished.

“It’s an unending cycle,” Fares said.
Both the scope and the frequency of such
demolitions have increased since the Supreme
Court’s decision, which made it much easier
for Israeli judges to deny the appeals submit-
ted by the families’ lawyers. And while those
appeals, too, were often denied in the past, the
legal proceedings went on for years, buying
the residents time to remain in their villages 

and organize their community struggle.
Masafer Yatta is part of Area C, a designation
under the Oslo Accords, which covers 61 per-
cent of the West Bank and is under full Israeli
military and civil control. Out of the hundreds
of requests for building permits the army re-
ceived between 2000 and 2020, it has denied
over 99 percent of requests in Area C, ac-
cording to data provided by the Israeli NGO
Bimkom—Planners for Planning Rights.
In the 15 months since the Supreme Court
ruling, the army has imposed a curfew on Jin-
ba, the village where Nidal was born. Soldiers
built two checkpoints next to the village: At
one, there is a black tent; at the other, a tank.
Both are used to detain residents, to confiscate
their vehicles, and to block visitors from enter-
ing the village.

The court’s ruling in May “cut us off from
the other villages,” Nidal said. “Every time we
want to leave, to visit our family members, to
go shopping, the soldiers detain us for at least
two hours. That’s the best case-scenario. One
time, they held me up for seven hours.”
People are afraid to drive to the villages for
fear of losing their vehicles. In recent months,
residents testify, soldiers have confiscated the
cars of humanitarian workers, schoolteachers,
and lawyers providing legal assistance to the
residents. This policy also has a chilling effect
on journalists, who are less able to come and
report on the region. Cutting Masafer Yatta off
from other communities is expected to make it
easier for the army to carry out the population
transfer with as few witnesses as possible.

The day before the start of school last year,
soldiers refused to let the teachers of Jinba’s
elementary school enter the village to prepare
the classrooms. The soldiers at the checkpoint
confiscated their car, explaining that they were in a firing zone. These decisions
are made arbitrarily: The following day, the soldiers let the teachers through.
Royda Abu Aram, from the village of Al-Halawah, is a student in 12th grade,
the year students take the tawjihi exams—the Palestinian equivalent of the SATs.

“Yesterday I missed all my classes because there was no way for me to get there
without a car or transportation,” she said. “My friend Bisan, who tried to get
to school by car, was delayed by the soldiers for an hour and a half, in the sun.”
In a video recording of the checkpoint from August, a soldier, his hand
resting on his gun and a large tank behind him, explains to a group of several
adults and school-age children, backpacks slung across their
shoulders, that “this area is designated as a firing zone, the
army closed this area, and we are conducting searches here.”
Every school in Masafer Yatta has received a demolition
order. “I really want to work in education. I’m interested in
studying at university and becoming a language and English
teacher,” Bisan, also a 12th grader, said. “But I’m worried I
won’t do well on the tawjihi exam in these circumstances. It’s
hard to learn when you know that you may wake up tomor-
row and bulldozers will come to demolish your school.”

The supreme court
ruling also granted
permission to the Is-
raeli military to start
training with live fire
in the area. Tanks have been roaring
through the area between the vil-
lages while soldiers fire live rounds
and detonate explosives; helicopters
have been practicing landing and
taking off. All these loud noises join
the buzzing of the drones that the
soldiers, and sometimes the nearby
settlers, use to monitor whether residents are building new
houses after their homes have been destroyed.]

“It’s hard to learn when
you know that you may
wake up tomorrow and
bulldozers will come to
demolish your school.”
—Bisan, a 12th-grade student

“Our entire village went outside to look at them,” said
Jinba resident Issa Younis, after a day of tank training that
took place next to the village last June. “The noise of the
tanks was deafening. The mine detonations started before

sunrise, right by our houses. All the walls shook, like we were in an earthquake.”
During one of these training sessions, in the village of Al-Majaz, soldiers
placed targets on the windows of the houses, on a tractor, and on a car. Jabar, a
15-year-old boy, left his house to see what was going on. A sand cloud swirled
around him—the result of a tank driving through the desert region. “The
soldiers hung targets on the window of our house and on the haystacks,” Jabar
said. “They wrote that they would be returning soon to shoot, but I took the
targets down.”

The military promised the court that it would take precautionary measures
when conducting any exercises with live fire, and that the soldiers would not
endanger the lives of the residents. The reality has been different. In July 2022,
Leila Dababsa was sitting in her home when she heard an explosion above her

The ceiling began to crumble. “The living room was filled with the sound of

gunfire, and my daughter screamed,” she said, pointing to
the holes in the tin roof. Most of the houses are built from
cheap materials, out of fear that they will be destroyed. Leila
and her daughter escaped and hid in a nearby cave.
“A second before they shot our house, I was picking
tomatoes in the garden,” said Sa’ud Dababsa, whose house
was targeted. “This is the first time that a bullet entered
our home, into the living room. Before, we were in danger
of being expelled. Now my family and I are in danger of
being killed.”

Historically, the expulsion process in Masafer Yatta can
largely be traced back to two men: Ariel Sharon and Ehud
Barak, both of whom were senior military figures who later
became Israeli prime ministers. They represent competing
camps in Israeli politics: Sharon
headed the Likud party, which is
identified with the Zionist right,
and Barak led the Labor Party,
which is affiliated with the Zionist
left. But on issues related to Masa-
fer Yatta, the two worked together
in harmony.

After leading the conquest of
the West Bank in 1967, Sharon,
then a military official, began the
process of declaring various areas
as military firing zones, first in
the Jordan Valley and later
in Masafer Yatta. “As one of
the people who initiated the
firing zones in 1967, every-
one was aware of one goal: to
enable Jewish settlement in
the area,” Sharon testified in
1979. “Back then, I sketched
out these firing zones, reserv-
ing our land for settlement.”

The locations of the firing
zones weren’t chosen random-
ly. They perfectly matched the
Allon Plan, which was submit-
ted to the Israeli government
a month after the occupation
began by Yigal Allon, anoth-
er future prime minister, and
which determined that the
areas should be permanently
kept under full Israeli control.

With their relatively arid climate, these areas
had few Palestinian villages compared to the
crowded northern West Bank, which made
them appealing for Jewish settlement.
A map commissioned by the state in 1977
designates part of the Masafer Yatta region for
such settlement. Three years later, in 1980,
firing zones were declared in the same area.
In a secret meeting of the Ministerial Com-
mittee for Settlement Affairs held in July 1981,
Sharon offered the army the firing zone that
was declared in Masafer Yatta and reaffirmed
that his goal was to remove Palestinians from
the area, according to the official transcript.
“We have a great interest in being there, given
the phenomenon of Arabs from the villages
spreading toward the desert [in the south],” he
explained to the army chief of staff.

During the same period, the Israeli govern-
ment worked to establish Jewish settlements
in the region. Settlements like Susya, Ma’on,
and Carmel were part of the state’s policy of
cutting off the Palestinian population in the
Negev, which is inside Israel, from the Pales-
tinian population in the southern West Bank,
like the residents of Masafer Yatta.

“For many years, there was a physical con-
nection between the Arab population of the
Negev with the Arab population in the Hebron
hills. A situation was created in which the bor-
der extends inside our territory,” Sharon told
the settlement committee. “We must quickly
create a buffer strip of [ Jewish] settlement,
which will distinguish and separate the He-
bron hills from Jewish settlement in the Ne-
gev. To drive a wedge between the bedouins in
the Negev and the Arabs in Hebron.”
Sharon’s words are particularly relevant
today, as not only the residents of Masafer
Yatta but also the Bedouins in the Negev are 

being dispossessed of their land through the
systematic denial of building permits and the
declaration of military firing zones.
In 1999, ehud barak was elected prime
minister. These were the days of the
Oslo Accords, four years after Yitzhak
Rabin’s assassination—when there was
still hope among Israelis and Palestin-
ians that a peace deal might come. But Barak’s
government decided to permanently remove
the residents of Masafer Yatta. Under his
watch, in November 1999, soldiers moved
through all the villages, loaded 700 people
into trucks, and expelled them. They became
refugees in nearby villages.

“I remember that day vividly,” said Safa
Al-Najar, now 70. “Soldiers came inside, while
outside there were two big trucks waiting.
They lifted us onto them by force, with all of
our belongings. The sheep escaped on foot.
They threw us into another village.”

Barak’s ethnic cleansing, carried out by
a government that included the left-wing
Meretz party, inspired protests in Israel led by
intellectuals, among them famous authors like
David Grossman. The protesters met with the
general of the Central Command to express
opposition to the operation, but they were
told that it had to be carried out because, in
preparation for further negotiations with the
Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel had
a major interest in keeping the region part of
its sovereign territory.

The talks between Israel and the PLO for
a final peace resolution, which took place in
2000 at Camp David, apparently led Barak to
accelerate the dispossession efforts in Masafer
Yatta. The thinking was that if there were no
Palestinians living there, it would be more
likely that the region would
ultimately remain under Is-
raeli control.

This is one reason why the
“peace process” in the 1990s
was in fact deeply destruc-
tive for many Palestinians: It
galvanized rather than tamed
Israeli colonialism. In those
years, the number of Pal-
estinian home demolitions
grew significantly, while Jew-
ish settlements were quickly
populated and roads leading
to them were rapidly paved.

A few months after Barak
ordered their displacement,
the residents of Masafer Yatta petitioned the
Israeli Supreme Court against the firing zone.
Palestinians living in the West Bank are subject
to military law––they don’t have the right to

vote and so are unable to influence the legal system that
rules over them—and the Supreme Court has expanded its
jurisdiction to encompass the occupied territories.
Their petition remained before the court for more than
22 years. Instead of making a deci-
sion, the judges issued an interim
order allowing the displaced Pal-
estinians to temporarily return to
their homes. In 2012, while Barak
was defense minister, the state de-
clared in court that its demand
for forced transfer was still active,
and that the army was prepared to
allow residents access to work their
land only during Israeli holidays
and on the weekends, when no
military exercises took place.

Even this temporary reprieve
came to an end last May, when the judges finally rejected
the residents’ petition. In the ruling by Justice David Mintz,
the court accepted the state’s claims that when the firing
zone was declared over 40 years ago, the people of Masafer
Yatta were not “permanent residents” of the area, but rather
“seasonal residents.” That is, they used to move between
two places, depending on the shepherding season: They
had one house in a village in Masafer Yatta and another
in the city. According to the letter of the military law, the
declaration of a firing zone does not apply to permanent
residents in the territory, but since, as the state claimed,
the residents of Masafer Yatta were only “seasonal,” their
expulsion should be permitted. The Supreme Court agreed.
Such legal arguments don’t impress halima, who was born in a
cave in Al-Merkaz in 1948 and has lived there her whole life.
“That’s their court, not ours,” she said, “and they use the law in
order to expel us.”

The names of the Masafer Yatta villages are all over old maps
that predate the Israeli state, including one by British surveyors from 1879.

Another can be found in a 1931 book by a geographer named Nathan Shalem,
who visited homes in Jinba and noted that human settlement there “had never
ceased.” Aerial photographs from 1945 tes-
tify to the existence of the villages. Even the
official documentation of the State of Israel
shows that in 1966, the Israeli military blew
up 15 stone structures in Jinba, then under the
control of Jordan, later compensating the res-
idents through the International Red Cross.
The Supreme Court rejected this historical
evidence, which was attached to the residents’
petition. “The existence of the stone houses in
the ruins of Jinba, in 1966, has nothing to teach
us about the situation of things in 1980,” Mintz
explained in his ruling. He gave evidentiary
weight only to the area’s status in the year in
which the military’s firing zone was declared.
In their decision, the judges relied on the
work of an Israeli anthropologist, Ya’akov
Habakkuk, who lived in the region in the 1980s, for their claim of “season-
ality.” Habakkuk wrote that during the grazing season, in winter and spring,
the families lived in Masafer Yatta, but in the dry months of summer, they

ived in the adjacent city of Yatta. This describes the lifestyle
of many families living in the region in the past, though not
all of them.

Habakkuk himself is adamantly opposed to the court’s in-
terpretation of his work. He told us he had no idea his research
was being used to justify the expulsion. “It was obvious to ev-
eryone around that this is their village,” he said. “The families
came there consistently, always to the same cave, and when they
weren’t here, no one else would enter.”

International law explicitly forbids population transfers
in occupied territory, with almost no exceptions. But in their
ruling, the judges claimed that if there is a conflict between in-
ternational law and Israeli law, “Israeli law decides.” In the de-
cision, they wrote that the section of the Geneva Conventions
forbidding population transfers is intended “only to prevent
acts of mass expulsion of a population in occupied territory in
order to destroy it, to perform forced labor, or to achieve other
policy goals,” and therefore there is no connection with the
Masafer Yatta displacement, which was only ordered so that the
military could train there.

The ban on population transfers is found in the Fourth
Geneva Convention, in Section 49: “Deportations of protected
persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupy-
ing Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are
prohibited, regardless of their motive” (emphasis ours).

The story of Masafer Yatta thus represents the cornerstone
of Israeli settler colonialism throughout Israel-Palestine. On
both sides of the Green Line, Palestinian displacement is
largely achieved by way of the law: the systematic denial of
building permits, the denial of Palestinian ownership rights to
the land in question, the declaration of expansive firing zones,
the designation of national parks, and the establishment of new
Jewish settlements to “drive a wedge” and cut villages off from
one another.

“Everything that lies behind the process is the theft of our
land and the expulsion of our communities,” said Nidal Abu
Younis, the head of the Masafer Yatta village council. “Destroy-
ing our homes, confiscating our vehicles, destroying our roads
and schools––it’s all one massive crime. They can expel us at
any moment. Now more than ever, we are in need of interna-
tional solidarity.

THE NATION