On Monday, 5 May 2025, in the morning hours, Civil Administration personnel, escorted by Border Police officers and soldiers and equipped with an excavator and bulldozer, arrived in the community of Khirbet Khallet a-Dabe’ in the South Hebron Hills. The forces demolished ten homes, leaving 49 people, including 27 minors, without shelter. Additionally, the forces demolished 11 sanitation structures, two kitchen structures, 11 water tanks, five water cisterns, three structures used as sheep pens (including a cave), a hospitality hall, an electricity room, a solar power network and water infrastructure.
The community was left with the school building and four residential homes that are still under legal proceedings. Families whose homes were demolished received tents from a humanitarian organization and remained in the community area.
Khirbet Khallet a-Dabe’ is one of the communities in the Masafer Yatta region of the South Hebron Hills, which Israel declared a “closed military zone” in the early 1980s, with the aim of seizing the area and expelling its residents. Since then, the state has prohibited the development of the communities—many of which predate the occupation of the West Bank—prevented their connection to water and electricity infrastructure, and repeatedly demolished their homes, any infrastructure they tried to build, and even the roads leading to the communities. In recent years, the communities have also suffered repeated settler attacks, often with army assistance, which also allows settlers to establish outposts within the declared “firing zone” adjacent to them.
