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In Israel, a court case that lasted more than twenty years in a large area south of Hebron in the West Bank ended with the displacement of a thousand Palestinians. According to pro-Palestinian activists, it is one of Israel’s largest displacements since the forced exodus after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
On May 5, Israel’s Supreme Court finally ruled that the Masafer Yatta area, which the vast majority of Israel’s international community believes illegally occupies much of the West Bank, should have become a firing range for the Israeli army. Demolition work began in the days that followed. There are 12 Palestinian towns in the area, which are home to at least a thousand people (although higher estimates of up to 1,800 are circulating).
“They gave us half an hour to get what we could,” Yusara al Najjar, who lived with her family in Al Markez and was evicted on May 11, told the Washington Post.
A child wanders through the village of Jinba in the Masafer Yatta area the day after the Israeli Supreme Court ruling (AP Photo / Nasser Nasser)
It all started in the early 1980s when the Israeli army decided to make the approximately 30 square kilometer Masafer Yatta area an army firing range. “The vital importance of this firing range,” the army explained in some court documents read to the Times of Israel, “derives from its unique topographical features, which allow specific strategies to be developed for both small groups of soldiers and for a battalion to try”.
The entire Masafer Yatta area is located in what is known as Area C of the West Bank, where civilian and military control rests with the Israeli government under the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli law provides that a certain area in the West Bank can be reserved for the army if it is not permanently inhabited.
The Israeli army’s plans for Masafer Yatta began to materialize in the 1990s. In 1999, the Israeli army evicted around 700 people living in Masafer Yatta on the grounds that they were not permanent residents but rather nomadic herders who used the area to graze their animals. In 2000, residents requested and were granted a stay of eviction, which remained active until a few days ago, when the Israeli Supreme Court made its final decision.
Throughout the more than twenty-year process, the Israeli army’s thesis remained the same: Palestinians living in Masafer Yatta were nomads who lived in the area only occasionally, while most of the buildings in the 12 cities where they were built are after the army’s decision to build a shooting range.
Many residents of Masafer Yatta are defended by the Association for Civil Rights Israel (ACRI), one of Israel’s oldest human rights organizations. ACRI has argued for years that, in fact, several Palestinians lived permanently in the area prior to the 1980s and that, moreover, an occupying power cannot carry out mass displacement and displacement in the occupied territories under international law.
The Supreme Court eventually agreed with the Israeli army, arguing that the residents of Masafer Yatta could not be considered permanent residents.
However, some testimonies indicate that Israeli interests in the area were not only military in nature. In a report of a 1981 government meeting found in state archives in 2020, then-Israeli Minister of Agriculture Ariel Sharon, who would become prime minister twenty years later, proposed the idea of using the Masafer Yatta area as a military compound in the recent “expansion of the Arab inhabitants of these hills”. The document therefore seems to indicate that the Israeli army’s decision to build a polygon at Masafer Yatta follows a decision by some Palestinians to inhabit the area more permanently.
The report was accepted by the Supreme Court as evidence of the residents’ argument, but ultimately the judges chose to basically ignore it.
News site +972 Magazine estimates that the Israeli government has designated around 18 percent of the West Bank as a military zone since the 1970s. Around 6,200 Palestinians live in these areas today, mostly members of pastoral communities.
Israel’s management of Zone C has been disputed by much of the international community and Palestinian activists for years. Area C occupies about 60 percent of the entire West Bank territory and includes the most fertile soils and the best pastures. The permits that Israel gives to the Palestinians to construct buildings in Area C are very rare: instead, it is much more willing to grant permits to Israelis living in West Bank settlements, almost all of which are in Area C.
It is also not uncommon for the Israeli government to demolish Palestinian houses which, according to its own estimates, have been built irregularly: however, often these are one or more buildings, while in the case of Masafer Yatta we are talking about several dozen houses.
It is not clear how far the demolitions of Masafer Yatta’s villages progressed. In a press release last week, three UN experts dealing with Palestinian human rights abuses wrote that so far they have concerned the cities of Al Markez and Khribet al Fakhiet. In the statement, the three experts called on the Israeli government and the international community to suspend the evictions and criticized the legal basis on which the Israeli Supreme Court made its decision. However, there is currently no indication that the Israeli government intends to accept this .request.