A Military Zone Drawn Around Living Communities
In 1980, the Israeli military declared roughly 30,000 dunams of the South Hebron Hills a closed military area — Firing Zone 918. The declaration did not fall on empty land. Scattered across those hills were Palestinian farming and herding communities whose presence in the area, according to documentation gathered by B’Tselem, predates the state of Israel. Villages such as Tuba, Maghayir al-Abeed, Jinba, Halaweh, and Mirkez — collectively known as Masafer Yatta — continued to exist inside the newly drawn zone, their residents moving between seasonal dwellings, tending livestock, and cultivating terraced hillsides as they always had.
For more than four decades, the firing zone designation functioned as a slow mechanism of pressure: demolition orders issued against homes, water cisterns, and solar panels; restrictions on movement; and repeated military eviction attempts that residents and their lawyers repeatedly challenged in Israeli courts. Then, in May 2022, that legal buffer collapsed.
The Supreme Court Ruling and What It Authorised
On 4 May 2022, Israel’s Supreme Court issued a ruling that upheld the state’s authority to enforce Firing Zone 918 and cleared the way for the forcible transfer of approximately 1,200 Palestinians from at least eight hamlets within the zone. The court accepted the military’s argument that residents had not established permanent residency prior to the 1980 declaration — a finding that Palestinian legal advocates and the communities themselves have fiercely contested.
Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has documented the prolonged legal battle, noted that the ruling effectively reversed the evidentiary burden: communities that had lived on the land for generations were required to prove their presence to a court system operating within a military occupation framework. The ruling drew immediate condemnation from UN human rights bodies, with OCHA oPt warning that implementation would constitute forcible transfer — a grave breach of international humanitarian law under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Demolitions, Displacement, and Daily Life Under Threat
The months following the ruling brought an acceleration of what B’Tselem had already been documenting for years: the systematic dismantling of the physical fabric of Palestinian life in Masafer Yatta. Structures demolished or confiscated included family homes, animal pens, water storage cisterns, and solar energy systems installed by the renewable energy organisation Comet-ME — infrastructure that, in an area where the Israeli Civil Administration has long withheld building permits, represented the only viable means of sustaining communities off the electrical grid.
B’Tselem’s field researchers documented repeated demolition operations in which Israeli forces arrived at hamlets, issued immediate evacuation notices, and demolished or seized structures within hours, leaving families without shelter. In several cases documented by B’Tselem, the same structure was demolished more than once after residents rebuilt.
Palestinian journalist and activist Basel Adra, who grew up in Masafer Yatta and whose documentation of daily life under this threat is central to the award-winning film No Other Land (co-directed with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham), has provided one of the most sustained on-the-ground records of what these demolitions mean at the human level — families pulling belongings from rubble, children watching their homes come down, communities calculating whether to rebuild or to leave. His reporting, published in part through +972 Magazine, places specific demolition events within the longer history of Firing Zone 918 and the calculated pressure it imposes.
The Legal Architecture Behind the Evictions
Understanding Masafer Yatta requires understanding the layered legal system that governs the occupied West Bank. Under military orders in force since 1967, Palestinians in Area C — the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli military and civil control — require Israeli Civil Administration permits for nearly all construction. Those permits are denied at extraordinary rates. B’Tselem’s long-term data on Area C shows that building permits for Palestinians are structurally inaccessible, ensuring that any structure built without permission is perpetually vulnerable to demolition orders.
Firing Zone 918 compounds this: the military designation provides a separate, parallel legal track through which the state can order evacuation regardless of whether any specific structure carries a demolition order. As Adalah has argued, the cumulative effect is a system in which Palestinian communities are rendered legally precarious by design — their presence reframed as illegal encroachment on land that, under international law, remains occupied Palestinian territory.
OCHA oPt’s Protection of Civilians reporting has consistently flagged Masafer Yatta as one of the most acute displacement risk areas in the West Bank, noting that the combination of firing zone enforcement, settlement expansion in the surrounding South Hebron Hills, and settler violence against herding communities creates converging pressures that amount to a coercive environment.
What Remains at Stake
As of the time of this writing, the communities of Masafer Yatta have not been fully expelled. Residents continue to rebuild, legal challenges continue in various forums, and international attention generated in part by Basel Adra’s documentation has kept the case visible. But the Supreme Court ruling of May 2022 remains in force. The 1,200 people of Firing Zone 918 live under an eviction order that has no expiry date — on land their families have worked for generations, waiting for the next vehicle to arrive on the hillside road.
Sources
- B’Tselem — The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories: Masafer Yatta and South Hebron Hills documentation
- Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel: Firing Zone 918 legal filings and analysis
- OCHA oPt — Protection of Civilians weekly reports and West Bank displacement risk assessments
- +972 Magazine — Basel Adra’s reporting on Masafer Yatta
- No Other Land (2024) — documentary co-directed by Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham
- Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49 — prohibition on forcible transfer of protected persons
