The Ramat Yeshai settlement started in 1984, set up by settlers from Hebron who established 6 portable caravans at the Dir al-Arba'in (‘Assembly of Forty’) mosque. The initiative obtained official Israeli approval in 1998, and the Israel Defense Ministry gave the go-ahead for building 16 housing units on the site in 2001. Since then the land adjacent to the settlement is being incrementally taken over, notwithstanding stop-work orders handed down in judgements from the Israeli Supreme Court. Both the Abu Haikal and Abu Aisha families had saved and protected Jews from the slaughter of other Arabs during the 1929 Hebron massacre and the Israeli Interior Minister Yosef Burg had, according to Abu Aisha, specifically asked settlers not to harm the Abu Aisha for this reason in the early 80s. According to Ehud Sprinzak, an Israeli counterterrorism specialist and expert in far-right Jewish groups, "a small number of very radical Jewish families" settled in the area in the mid-1980s. According to Muhammad Abu Aisha, relations with the original settlers were amicable until the arrival of two Kahanists, Baruch Marzel and Noam Federman who took up residence there. On Marzel's arrival at Tel Rumeida he began to promote the ultra-nationalist Kahanist ideology, outlawed by Israeli law.