JINBA, Palestinian Territories — The threat of losing his
West Bank land has
loomed over Ali Mohammed Jabbareen for more than two decades, but he now fears
an Israeli court decision may finally force him to go.
اضافة اعلان
Jabbareen, 60,
lives in the Palestinian village of Jinba, part of the Masafer Yatta area in
the Israeli-occupied West Bank that has been at the centre of a protracted
legal battle.
In the early
1980s, the army declared the 7,400 acre area a restricted military area —
calling it “Firing Zone 918”.
The army said it
was uninhabited, and that anyone claiming to live there was doing so illegally.
The roughly
1,000
Palestinians who live there say Masafer Yatta was their people’s home
long before Israeli soldiers set foot in the West Bank.
Israel’s top
court ruled against the Palestinians last week, saying they had “failed to
prove” their claim to permanent residence before its declaration as a military
training zone.
The
European Union condemned the decision on Tuesday, saying “the establishment of a firing
zone cannot be considered an ‘imperative military reason’ to transfer the
population under occupation”.
The ruling made
no specific mention of evictions, which are usually followed by demolitions
such as one carried out Tuesday at Silwan in annexed east Jerusalem.
But Jabbareen
fears they could be carried out with little notice.
“We have no
information about the demolitions,” he told AFP as he gazed through the open
door of his one-room house at an Israeli military patrol stirring up dust on
the unpaved road nearby.
Army units with
clearance to destroy his home, “could come at any time”, he said.
‘No other place to
go’
Masafer Yatta residents insist they lived in the area even as control
of the West Bank changed hands — from the British mandate period through
Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967, the year the Israeli occupation began.
The isolated
community is in the West Bank’s “Area C” — which is under full Israeli control
— and is more than an hour’s drive from the nearest paved road.
Few of the homes
are connected to a water supply system or power grid.
Jabbareen built
his house into a rocky outcrop in the heart of his farmland. It is currently
home to 12 people, who scratch out a living raising sheep and growing
vegetables.
“This is my land
and they want to expel me from it,” he said.
Some residents
of Masafer Yatta were first kicked out in 1999.
The following
year, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) helped some of the
families challenge their expulsion in court.
They secured a
temporary reprieve that remained in force pending the high court’s final
decision last week.
Roni Pelli of
the ACRI said the verdict was “inherently flawed”.
“The villages in
Masafar Yatta are the homes of the petitioners, and they have no other home.”
She insisted
expelling them was “illegal,” and backed a long-standing allegation made by
Israeli critics that the army uses the military zone designation as a pretext
to grab West Bank land.
The Israeli
human rights group Akevot, which specialises in state and military archival
research, has obtained a document from 1981 in which then agriculture minister
and future prime minister Ariel Sharon proposed to set up the firing zone.
Sharon, in the
document, says the military zone declaration will ultimately make it easier to
expel the Palestinian residents.
‘We are the
opposite’
It was not immediately clear if the residents have any further legal
recourse to ward off evictions.
Inside
Jabbareen’s house, where blankets are piled high against a wall, he gestured to
a nearby
Jewish settlement and reflected on what he termed grossly unequal
treatment in the West Bank.
Some 475,000
settlers now live in the West Bank in communities considered illegal under
international law, alongside some 2.7 million Palestinians.
They are
frequently granted permission to build permanent structures with proper
electrical connections, while many Palestinians are denied building permits and
live under the threat of eviction, he said.
“They build with
concrete,” he said of the settlers.
“They are provided with
electricity and water. The army is guarding them, but we are just the
opposite.”
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