New Israeli directive expedites ethnic cleansing of Masafer Yatta
Israeli soldiers raid the village of Khilet Al-Dabe’, Masafer Yatta, in the southern West Bank, 3 June 2025.
Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra report in +972 on 25 June 2025:
In recent months, Israeli forces and settlers have intensified efforts to expel roughly 2,500 Palestinians living in a cluster of villages in the southern West Bank region of Masafer Yatta. In early May, when the military razed most of Khilet Al-Dabe’, it was the largest demolition in the area to date. Now, a new military directive threatens to fast-track the destruction of a dozen more villages.
Last week, the Civil Administration’s Central Planning Bureau — the Israeli military body responsible for issuing construction permits in the occupied Palestinian territories — adopted a policy requiring that all pending Palestinian building requests in Masafer Yatta be automatically rejected. The directive cites military needs as justification and specifically references Firing Zone 918, the area that encompasses 12 of Masafer Yatta’s 20 villages, and which Israel declared as a closed military zone in the early 1980s in order to forcibly displace its Palestinian residents.
The directive is based on a document issued last week by the army’s Central Command, which +972 and Local Call have obtained a copy of. According to the document, the residents of the area must be expelled “using the full range of civilian and security tools at [the army’s] disposal,” so that the army can practice live fire on their land “for the benefit of war in the various arenas — a war that has unfortunately become routine in the past year and a half and culminated in the events of Operation Rising Lions,” the Israeli name for the operation in Iran. Yehuda Alkalai, the head of the Central Planning Bureau, subsequently directed staff to align all decisions with this order.