By Awdah, Basel, Hamdan and Ali

Now that we have introduced ourselves, we would like to tell you a little bit about Masafer Yatta and what is happening to our land these days. Masafer Yatta is made up of 22 Palestinian villages in the south of the West Bank. It is 24 kilometers South of Hebron. The meaning of Masafer Yatta comes from the term Safar- which means travel in Arabic. For thousands of years, when Muslims would travel to Mecca, they would pass through Masafer Yatta. Hundreds of men would pass through the Masafer as a shortcut to Mecca on their camels and rest in the villages of Merkaz and Jinbah.

Before 1966, Palestinians in Masafer Yatta lived simple lives as farmers, grazing their sheep and working their land. Many of them lived in caves they dug for themselves and their families. Since the occupation began in 1967, the military control of Masafer Yatta changed our lives and made it harder for Palestinians to live on this land- the military occupation and settlers invest their power in racist laws to steal our land and forcibly evacuate Palestinians from their homes.

In the 1980’s, Israel began to build large settlements in Masafer Yatta, most of this land is stolen Palestinian land. People living in the 22 communities of Masafer Yatta lost many dunams of land to graze on and were forced to leave their homes because of settler attacks. During the same years, the military declared 12 villages in Masafer Yatta a firing zone, or land for the military to conduct their training, to justify the forced evacuation of about 1,300 Palestinians in the area.

Then in 1999, the first evacuation occured in these communities. The army came with a map that separated the firing zone from the rest of Masafer Yatta, and with their trucks, removed the people living inside the firing zone by force. The people living within the borders of the firing zone set up tents and dispersed into other communities within Masafer Yatta. For six months they were living out of their land in hard conditions. Some of them tried to return to their land and some were caught by soldiers. As a punishment, the army would take away their sheep and charge them an expensive fine in order to receive their sheep from the army. Towards the end of the second month, there was a temporary court ruling that allowed the people from the firing zone to return to their homes, leaving it up to the Isreali supreme court to decide the fate of this community.

This past May, almost twenty-two years after fighting a very tough legal battle, the occupation court gave the green light to the army to do as they like in Masafer Yatta, allowing the military to legally transfer people from their homes and carry out military training in our backyards. We are here to tell their stories. Stories of demolitions, stories of families and stories of Palestine.