On Wednesday, 2 September 2026, Civil Administration personnel arrived at the community of Khirbet a-Taban, in Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron Hills, with a military and Border Police escort and diggers. They demolished all 12 homes in the community and almost all its other structures, leaving the residents homeless. The residents were given no warning prior to the demolition and were not allowed to remove their property.
The community was home to 12 families, numbering 70 people, including 28 children. The residents made their living from farming and raising some 600 head of livestock.
The homes that were demolished were cinder-block structures roofed with sheet metal. The forces also demolished 12 outhouses, four water cisterns, 10 livestock pens, seven tarpaulin and sheet-metal structures used to store fodder, three facilities for growing azolla, 15 water tanks, a towed water tanker and two sheep-milking stations. The forces also destroyed the entrances to four caves and blocked the entrances to four others, all of which were used for storage.
Only one sheet-metal structure, used as a metalworking shop, remains in the community. A stop-work order for the structure was issued today, 2 September 2026.
About two months ago, the Civil Administration rejected a master plan submitted for the community, on the grounds that the military commander had not approved planning for the area.
Since October 2023, Israel has already expelled 65 Palestinian communities, in addition to 18 communities that have been partially expelled.
Background
In the early 1980s, the Israeli military declared an area of about 30,000 dunams [3,000 hectares] in the South Hebron Hills, which includes the community’s land, a restricted military zone, and dubbed it “Firing Zone 918.”
In October and November 1999, the military expelled all 700 or so residents of 12 villages in the area on the official grounds that they were “illegally living in a firing zone”. This flimsy argument blatantly ignored the fact that the families had been living in the area for many years, since before Israel occupied the West Bank and afterwards, with the full knowledge of Israeli authorities.
Following the expulsion, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Attorney Shlomo Lecker filed petitions to the High Court of Justice (HCJ) on behalf of some 200 families from the villages. In March 2000, the HCJ issued an interim injunction permitting the villagers to return to their homes and graze their livestock in their fields pending a ruling in the case.
Ultimately, the HCJ rejected the residents’ petition. In early May 2022, it also rejected additional petitions filed by residents of the area, after accepting each and every one of the state’s arguments. Cherry-picking facts and relying on an absurd legal interpretation, the court made it clear there was no crime it would not find a way to sanction.
The justices held that the petitions must be rejected outright, as they were filed many years after the firing zone was declared and as the petitioners came to court “with absolutely unclean hands”, having built structures without permits over the years. The justices also held that regarding the matter itself, the petition should be rejected as, in their opinion, the military commander has the power to declare closed military zones in the occupied territory that supersedes the provisions of international law. Finally, the justices held that the petitioners were not “permanent residents” of the area before it was declared a firing zone and rejected the petition. In doing so, they allowed the state to immediately expel the residents and destroy their communities.
The State of Israel cites formal arguments such as “living in a firing zone” and “violating planning and building laws” to justify its policy in Masafer Yatta. These are false claims, meant to conceal Israel’s aspirations to take over the land for its own purposes and use it to benefit the Jewish population only.
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In 2013, village resident Jabriyeh Hamamdeh, then 45, described in testimony she gave B’Tselem field researcher Musa Abu Hashhash the harsh living conditions resulting from Israel’s prevention of development and the repeated attempts to expel the village’s residents.