In Masafer Yatta, in the south of the occupied West Bank, in the hills near Hebron, a dozen Palestinian villages and about a thousand people can be evicted at any time, so that the land is reserved for the training of the Israeli army. The Supreme Court approved it on the night of Wednesday to Thursday May 5, after 23 years of legal battle between the Jewish state and the Palestinian inhabitants.
With our correspondent in Ramallah, Alice Froussard
For the inhabitants, mostly Palestinian shepherds or farmers, it is a rural, poor, arid area of 3,000 hectares, with the air of lunar landscapes. But for the IDF, this stretch of land has another name: Firing Zone 918.
Often, the soldiers come to train, roam the fields in armored vehicles and their helicopters fly very close to the houses. Sometimes some of them are destroyed, to the detriment of the local community. The legal battle lasted 23 years. Overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, the Supreme Court delivered its decision, giving the green light to the expulsion and forcible transfer of around 1,000 Palestinians. This is one of the most important deportation decisions since the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967.
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Under the Geneva Conventions, it is illegal to expropriate occupied land for purposes that do not benefit the people living there or to forcibly transfer a local population. But the Jewish state says the villagers are not permanent residents and have no rights to the land.
So far, the Israeli Defense Ministry has not commented. For his part, the chairman of the board of Masafar Yatta, Nidal Younes, speaks of a decision ” racist, taken by a judge who lives in a colony, destroying in five minutes the life of 12 villages after 20 years of battle “. And according to the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, it is ” of a clear step in the de facto annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories to cement military rule indefinitely “.
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