# Masafer Yatta

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Masafer Yatta (Arabic: مسافر يطا, also spelled Mosfaret Yatta) is a collection of 19 Palestinian hamlets in the southern West Bank, in the Hebron Governorate of Palestine, located between 14 and 24 kilometres (9–15 mi) south of the city of Hebron, in the South Hebron Hills. It has been subject to being within an Israeli-declared military "firing zone" since the 1970s.
The hamlets are situated within the municipal boundary of Yatta on the site of a former Israeli Defence Force live-fire range. The name Masafer is believed to derive from the Arabic words for 'traveling', in light of the distance needed to travel from Yatta, or 'nothing' in light of the local belief that "nothing" would be able to live in the area. The 2024 documentary film No Other Land, winner of the Best Documentary Oscar, focuses on Masafer Yatta.

## Population and administration

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, six of the localities that make up Masafer Yatta (Mantiqat Shi'b al-Batim, Khirbet Tawil ash-Shih, Khirbet al-Fakhit, Khirbet Bir al-Idd, Khirbet Asafi and Maghayir al-Abeed) had a population of 768 in 2007. The 8 villages affected by a 2022 Israeli expulsion order have a population of 1,144, half of them children. Nearby at-Tuwani serves as a center for the Bedouin localities of Masafer Yatta. Masafer Yatta is administered by a local development committee whose members are appointed by the Ministry of Local Affairs of the Palestinian National Authority.

## History

In 1881, the British Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) noted the following places: Shảb el Butm, meaning 'the spur of the terebinth', Tuweil esh Shîh, meaning 'the peak or ridge of Artemisia', Khirbet el Fekhît, meaning 'the ruin of the fissure', and Khirbet Bîr el 'Edd, meaning 'the ruin of the perennial well'. At Khirbet Bîr el 'Edd, PEF noted "traces of ruins, and a cistern", while at Khirbet el Fekhît, they noted "traces of ruins, and a cave."

### Israeli occupation

Since the June War in 1967, Masafer Yatta has been under Israeli occupation. The hamlet cluster is part of "Area C", meaning that Israel has full military and civil control over it. The area is used by the army for military training and was denominated Firing Zone 918 by the Israeli army, after, according to a cabinet minute of 1981, Ariel Sharon had explicitly stated that the purpose of such a redefinition would be to enable the expulsion of the local Palestinian residents. More than one thousand Palestinians risk being expelled from their homes and properties.
According to The Guardian, "Palestinian water cisterns, solar panels, roads and buildings here are frequently demolished on the grounds that they do not have building permits, which are nearly impossible to obtain, while surrounding illegal Israeli settlements flourish. The community are mostly herders, raising goats and sheep throughout scorching summers and freezing winters." Bir el-Eid, which is closest to the unauthorized Israeli settlement Mitzpeh Yair, report having their cistern vandalized by having an animal carcass thrown into it. Palestinians said that "the Israeli settlers were believed to be behind the vandalism".
The villagers appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court on the grounds that they have evidence of living in the area before the Israeli occupation. Israeli authorities have attempted to relocate the residents to Yatta, supplying aerial photographic evidence which illustrates no or limited signs of habitation prior to the 1990s. Former senior Defense Ministry advisor, Kobi Eliraz reinforced the point, stating, “They never lived there. You don’t see, for example, consistent agricultural cultivation or orchards [in satellite photos]…There are no permanent houses that are clear and visible to the eye,”
However, the appeal from the villages is based on the argument that during the Israeli assault on Samu nearby, in 1966, the villagers of Jinba suffered damage, – the UN documented shortly after 15 houses that had been blown up by Israeli forces-and the damage was formally recognized soon after by the Jordanian government, which paid residents compensation for their losses in April and May 1967: 350 dinars per each stone house destroyed; 100 dinars for every killed camel, and seven for each sheep. It is argued to the contrary that what was blown up were Bedouin tents. Yet the Israeli geographer Natan Shalem, in his book Midbar Yehuda (Judean Desert) in 1931, stated that several villages there were not Bedouin nomadic encampments. Other evidence attests to the existence of inhabited sites outside Yatta-Jinba, Markaz, Al-Mafkara, Fakhit, Thaban, Al-Majaz, Sarura, Simra, Mughayer Al-Abid, Halawa, Sfei, Rakiz, Tuba, and Khalet a-Daba – long before the occupation.

### Attack by Israeli settlers

In September 2021, a mob of approximately 80 to 100 masked Israeli settlers invaded the village of Khirbat al-Mufkara, one of the hamlets that compose Masafer Yatta, throwing stones at houses and damaging cars; 12 Palestinians were injured, including a three-year-old Palestinian child who was hit in the head when an Israeli settler threw a stone at him while he was asleep inside his home.
Foreign Minister Yair Lapid reacted by calling it a "violent incident", "horrific, and it is terror. This isn't the Israeli way, and it isn't the Jewish way. This is a violent and dangerous fringe, and we have a responsibility to bring them to justice."

### Forcible transfer

In May 2022, the Israeli Supreme Court endorsed the IDF position regarding an area of 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) in which 12 Palestinian villages are cited, paving the way for the expulsion of 1,000 residents, which would be the largest deportation since the 1970s. One of the judges involved in the ruling, David Mintz, resides in the Israeli settlement of Dolev in the West Bank. On 10 May, the European Union said "settlement expansion, demolitions, and evictions are illegal under international law", and that setting up a firing zone is not an "imperative military reason" for transfer of an occupied population.
Once demolitions got underway, one family in one of the affected villages, Khirbet al-Fakhiet, cleared out space in a cavern for themselves and their livestock to tide them over winter. The homes of 80 people in Khallet Athaba were scheduled to be bulldozed on 29 September 2022. Access to grazing land used by the shepherds was, according to local herders, subsequently taken over by settlers, and both charities attempting to assist the affected communities and activists endeavouring to defend them from settlers were denied permission to enter the zone's perimeter for lack of travel permits.
The United Nations stated that Israeli actions could amount to a war crime. On 2 January 2023, B'Tselem described the expulsions as a "fast-track war crime".

## In Nakba scholarship

Ilan Pappé's essay Everyday Evil in Palestine: The View from Lucifer's Hill looks at Masafer Yatta as a case study of the daily occurrences of "incremental colonization, ethnic cleansing, and oppression" that are emblematic of the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people. Lucifer Hill is a rise overlooking Masafer Yatta where Pappé notes "both the oppression and the resistance to it are visible", and where he notes that "all anyone needs to grasp the realities of this ongoing oppression is one hill, and one hour". It is also one of the places in the West Bank that Ariel Handel identified in 2009 in a "map of disaster".
Pappé charts the evolution of the efforts to drive Masafer Yatta's residents from the area, from the expropriation of Palestinian land by Israel by means of the World Zionist Organization and the Israeli government's designation of grazing lands as forbidden for human settlement to the more method of driving out the residents by destroying water facilities and declaring surrounding areas as firing zones. In what Pappé terms a method of ethnic cleansing, much of Masafer Yatta had already been declared a firing zone by 1977, codenamed Firing Zone 918, allowing the Israeli army to demolish houses, burn crops, stop wells and block access to fields – a method that has been used even more extensively since 1999.

## Cultural references

The 2024 documentary film No Other Land, winner of the Best Documentary Oscar, focuses mainly on the effects of the Israeli occupation of Masafer Yatta.