Published: 9 December 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
BEN LYNFIELD: Human rights group B’Tselem says Masafer Yatta, near Hebron, is being targeted as part of a campaign to make life so unbearable that Palestinians will leave their homes.
The Israeli Civil Administration is deliberately destabilising children’s education in a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank as part of what human rights groups say is a larger effort to make life so difficult for local residents that they will leave their homes.
On Tuesday Israeli soldiers drove into Khirbet a-Safai al-Foqa hamlet in the Masafer Yatta area, south of Hebron, and confiscated two tents used for studies, a bathroom, water tank, desks, chairs and notebooks, according to Musa Abu Mreer, an English teacher at the facility.
“They didn’t leave anything but the ground,” Abu Mreer told The Jewish Independent.
The tents were set up as a replacement by the villagers for an elementary school on the same spot that was demolished by Israeli forces on November 23. The demolition, which according to military administrators was carried out because the building was constructed illegally, took place in the morning while school was in session.
Rights group B’tselem says the army actions are part of a coercive process against Palestinians in the Masafer Yatta area that amounts to “forcible transfer” of a protected population under occupation. Spokeswoman Dror Sadot says that amounts to a “war crime”, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Foreign Ministry and Israel Defense Force did not respond to the allegation.
Local Council head Nidal Younes told The Jewish Independent that the confiscation and demolition “are part of the steps and pressures” to remove about a thousand Palestinians living in tiny herding hamlets in the south Hebron hills. The IDF veterans antioccupation group Breaking the Silence “totally” agrees with that assessment according to its spokesman Ori Givati. In May, a Supreme Court ruling greenlighted the expulsion of the Palestinians on the grounds that they are an illegal presence in an army designated firing zone.
