Palestinian villagers lose 20-year legal fight to hang on to homes

For Mohammed Ayub, the sun-blasted village of Khirbet al Fakheit is home. The Palestinian farmer has spent almost all his 46 years there and ekes out a living tending sheep, goats and pigeons on the arid slopes surrounding it.

To the Israeli armed forces, however, the hamlet in the southern tip of the occupied West Bank is something entirely different: part of Firing Zone 918, some 3,000 hectares of land they have sought for decades to turn into a military training area.

In May, after a 20-year legal battle, Israel’s top court granted the military its wish. In a ruling issued late on the eve of a public holiday, the Supreme Court gave the armed forces the green light to use the area — which includes eight Palestinian villages — as a firing zone and to evict its roughly 1,200 inhabitants.

The ruling paves the way for what activists and diplomats say would be the biggest eviction in decades and has highlighted the pressures Palestinians in the West Bank have faced since Israel’s occupation began in 1967. The threat of expulsions has drawn criticism from the UN and EU and left villagers such as Ayub facing an anxious future.

“We are afraid all the time,” he said. “We don’t know what will happen, whether they will chase us away . . . everything is very fragile.”

The battle over the scattered villages in the region of Masafer Yatta, reachable only by dirt tracks that wind their way through the ridges and boulders of the South Hebron Hills, began in the 1980s when Israeli officials designated the area a closed military zone.

According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the designation was preceded by “staff work”, a “variety of relevant operational considerations” and “the fact that the area was uninhabited at the time”.

However, residents say they have lived in the area for generations — some in caves dug into the hillsides that provide respite from the harsh climate — with many earning their livelihoods through herding.

In 1999, Israel issued eviction orders for about 700 Palestinian residents in Masafer Yatta. Following a legal challenge, they were allowed to return until a final ruling but effectively prohibited from building new structures.

The next two decades became a legal limbo, with lawyers tussling over the legality of evictions and Israeli authorities repeatedly demolishing houses, cisterns and other structures on the basis they had been built without permits and were illegal.

Ayub was among those whose home was destroyed — first in January and then again in May after it had been rebuilt.

The May demolition left Ayub wondering whether he should move his wife and six children into the cave where he was born and had lived until he was 29. It was one of several carried out since the Israeli supreme court issued its final ruling.

The court found that the Palestinian villagers had failed to prove they had title to land in the firing zone or that they had lived there permanently before the military declared it a training area.

It also argued that Israel’s military had the right to declare closed zones and prohibit unauthorised access, and that international law preventing the forced transfer of populations was not relevant to the case.

Lawyers representing the Masafer Yatta villagers say the legal arguments were “erroneous” and have a launched a last-ditch petition in the supreme court for them to be re-examined in the hope of reversing the decision.

“This is occupied territory, so the Israeli army cannot use the land for general purposes [such as training],” said Roni Pelli, from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. “The villages of Masafer Yatta cannot serve as an IDF training field.”

Residents see the ruling as a pretext. “It’s very obvious that this is an excuse to ensure that Palestinians no longer exist in this part of the area,” said Nidal Abu Younes, head of the local council in Masafer Yatta.

During the legal battle, lawyers for the residents submitted a transcript from a 1981 meeting in which the then agriculture minister Ariel Sharon proposed allocating more land in the South Hebron Hills to the IDF for training exercises in light of the “expansion of Arab farmers from the hills”.

In the wake of the verdict, the case has drawn increased international attention. Earlier this month, diplomats from the EU and other countries visited Masafer Yatta and met locals, who showed them a house in the village of Khallet Athabaa that they said had been hit by a bullet during a recent live fire drill carried out by the Israeli military.

The IDF said a “preliminary examination found no connection between the fire used during the exercise and the damaged parts of the structure” but that additional safety measures would be taken in future training.

Some in Masafer Yatta hope international attention could yet prevent them being evicted. But others, such as Nidjah al Jabareen, a mother of 11 whose family have both a house and a cave in the village of Jinba, are steeling themselves for further resistance.

“If [the Israeli authorities] come to demolish, we will go inside the cave so that it is destroyed on top of us. This is the land of our grandfathers and grandmothers . . . this is their land and we will not leave,” she said. “Everything we own, everything we have is here.”