Dear friends,
We are reaching out to you with an urgent call for help, out of a deep sense of responsibility toward our friends in Masafer Yatta, whom we have accompanied for many years in their struggle to survive on their land. They need your assistance. Below we will explain how you can help.
Yesterday, on 18 June, the High Planning Council of the Judea and Samaria district (yes, without us even noticing, the territories have been effectively annexed to the State of Israel) made a severe and arbitrary decision allowing the IDF to train in the infamous Firing Zone 918. The meaning of this decision is the complete destruction of 12 villages, home to about 2,800 people, and the final act of ethnic cleansing in Masafer Yatta.
Firing Zone 918 is one of the most criminal and deceitful schemes devised by the State of Israel to seize privately-owned Palestinian land and transfer it to Jewish hands, as explicitly admitted by Ariel Sharon, who initiated the move in 1980: “All the firing zones were intended for one purpose only – to enable Jewish settlement in the area.”
Although the area has barely been used for training, the IDF lied in dozens of court hearings, claiming the area was essential for military purposes. At the same time, the state encourages the establishment of numerous illegal outposts across the region, taking over Palestinian land and practically proving that the claim of a need for a “firing zone” is a complete fiction.
For years, the courts refrained from ruling on the dubious demand to evict hundreds of families from their homes, until in May 2022, a High Court panel led by the settler Judge Mintz issued a distorted and error-ridden ruling approving the eviction of Palestinian residents from land they had lived on for generations. Since then, the military and settlers have intensified their abuse of the residents, through both pogroms and denial of grazing, and through massive demolitions carried out by the Civil Administration.
Over the years, many residents and communities turned to the courts to regulate their legal status, presenting proof of land ownership. The courts repeatedly delayed rulings, and now we understand why.
Yesterday, based on a classified military notice from 17 June, planning committees were suddenly instructed to suspend all planning and legal proceedings in the area, on the sweeping claim of “security needs” for military training. There is no real basis for this claim, and it was not backed by documents or any transparent process.
The significance of this directive is the blanket approval for immediate demolition of homes, schools, and infrastructure within days or weeks. Years of well-argued legal proceedings were erased with the stroke of a pen.
All of this is happening under the blatant exploitation of the war with Iran, and in complete violation of due process and the principles of the rule of law. The state is cynically and falsely using “security arguments” to enforce a policy of destruction and ethnic cleansing, at a moment that is anything but coincidental.
The courts have already made it clear to the residents’ lawyers that they do not intend to intervene on behalf of Palestinian rights – not property rights, not human rights, not basic justice, and not Jewish morality.
According to the lawyers, there are now only two ways left to help and try to make an impact: one is to continue strengthening the residents through our personal connections on the ground; the other – is through diplomatic channels. That’s why we urgently need your help.
If you have any connections – personal, direct, or indirect – to foreign embassies, to members of parliament in Europe or the U.S., to international organizations in Israel or abroad – please forward this document to them.
For the sake of the residents of Masafer Yatta, who are clinging to their land with all their might, stop and think: Who can I send this call to? Who can speak out, exert pressure, stop the expulsion?
This is a fight for life – for existence, for the future, for basic justice.
Thank you from the bottom of our hearts,
The Villages Group, on behalf of the South Hebron Hills Communities
For further information: villagesgroup1@gmail.com
See also:
Amnesty International, “Israel/oPt: Masafer Yatta community in occupied West Bank under imminent threat of forcible transfer” (February 2025)
Photo: Palestinian village of Khirbat Janbah, 2013. Source: Oren Ziv/Activestills.
