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The land being reformatted for military purposes is one of the largest expulsions of the population since the 1967 invasion.
After a long legal battle, the Israeli high court has decided today that 1,000 Palestinians can be expelled from an area of the West Bank for the land to be reclassified for military purposes.
The decision is one of the largest expulsions of the Palestinian people from their lands since the beginning of the occupation of the territories in 1967, writes e the British daily The Guardian.
About 3,000 hectares in the rural area of Masafer Yatta, south of the Hebron hills, are home to some Palestinian villages, but have been designed as a “fire zone” by the Israeli state and will be used for military maneuvers, so the presence of civilians is prohibited.
According to the Geneva Convention regarding the humanitarian treatment during the war, it is illegal to appropriate the occupied land or the forced expulsion of the inhabitants there, writes The Guardian.
But Israel argues that Masafer Yatta villagers live as farmers in the area Firing Zone 918are not its residents or were not there when it was declared as such, therefore they have no land rights.
The court ruling was announced Wednesday night, which said it accepted the state argument that residents who could not prove they had been there since the 1980s were losing.
The court rejected the claim that “the ban on forced eviction is applicable”, but called it a norm that is not applicable in domestic courts, according to Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard.
The judges’ decision was unanimous but it is not clear whether the residents of the eight villages in Masafer Yatta can appeal.
“The court issued a racist decision, taken by Judge David Mintz, who resides in an illegal Israeli colony in the West Bank,” said Nidal Younes, head of Masafar Yatta village council.
“We have been fighting in Israeli courts for 20 years, and this judge only wanted five minutes to destroy the lives of the 12 villages that depend on this land,” Younes added.
“History only repeats itself: Nakba after Nakba,” he said, using the Arabic word for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Israel during its creation in 1948.
18% of the occupied West Bank lands have been declared “fire zones” for the Israeli army since the 1970s.
According to the records of a ministerial meeting in 1981, then Minister of Agriculture Ariel Sharon, later prime minister, proposed the creation of ‘918 fire zones’ solely for the purpose of expelling Palestinians from their homes.
Palestinian communities living near these “fire zones” are often threatened with house demolition and confiscation of bread because they do not have building permits issued by Israel and are virtually impossible to obtain.
Residents of Masafer Yatta have also been the target of attacks by residents of nearby illegal Israeli colonies.
In 1999, 700 residents of the ‘918 Fire Zone’ were deported, but after an appeal by the human rights group in Israel, they were allowed to return until a final court decision, in an embarrassing ‘status quo’ , which ended with yesterday’s decision.
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