Location Description

Yata / Southern Hebron hills

Yatta is the district city of the southern Hebron hills region. It is located in the border zone between the fertile area of Hebron and its surroundings and the desert of the Hebron Mountains. Yata has about 64,000 inhabitants. The surrounding villages are called Masafar Yatta (Yatta's daughter villages). Their inhabitants subsist on livestock and agriculture. Agriculture is possible only in small plots, especially near stream channels. Most of the area is rocky and rocky.

From the beginning of the 1980s, a number of settlements were established on the agricultural land cultivated by the Palestinians in the southern Hebron hills region: Carmel, Maon, Susia, Masadot Yehuda, Othniel and more. Since the settlements were established and palestinians' cultivation areas have been reduced, the residents of the southern Hebron Mountains have been suffering from harassment by the settlers, while attempts to evict and demolish houses have continued, along with prevention of water and electricity. The military and police usually refrain from intervening in violent incidents and do not exhaust an investigation required for law enforcement on the violent Jewish settlers The harassment in the southern Hebron Mountains includes attacking and attempting to burn residential tents, harassing dogs, harming herds and preventing access to pastures.

There are several checkpoints in the southern Hebron hills, on Routes 317 and 60. In most of them, no military presence is apparent, but an array of pillboxes monitor the villages, and blockages are frequently set up according to the settlers and the army needs . These are Zif Junction, Dura-alFawwar crossing and the Sheep Junction at the southern entrance to Hebron.

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Susiya

The Palestinian area lies between the settlement of Susya and a military base.
The residents began to settle in areas outside the villages in the 1830s and lived in caves, tents and sukkot. To this day they maintain a traditional lifestyle and their livelihood is based on agriculture and herding. Until the 1948 war, the farmers cultivated areas that extended to the Arad area. As a result of the war, a significant portion of their land left on the Israeli side was lost. After the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation, military camps were established in the area, fire zones and nature reserves were declared, and the land area was further reduced.

The Jewish settlement in Susya began in 1979. Since then, there has been a stubborn struggle to remove the remains of Palestinian residents who refuse to leave their place of birth and move to nearby town Yatta. With the development of a tourist site in Khirbet Susya in the late 1980s (an ancient synagogue), dozens of families living in caves in its vicinity were deported. In the second half of the 1990s, a new form of settlement developed in the area - shepherds' farms of individual settlers. This phenomenon increased the tension between the settlers and the original, Palestinian residents, and led to repeated harassment of the residents of the farms towards the Palestinians. At the same time, demolition of buildings and crop destruction by security forces continued, as well as water and electricity prevention. In the Palestinian Susya, as in a large part of the villages of the southern Hebron Mountains, there is no running water, but the water pipe that supplies water to the Susya Jewish settlement passes through it. Palestinians have to buy expensive water that comes in tankers. Solar electricity is provided by a collector system, installed with donation funds. But the frequent demolitions in the villages do not spare water cisterns or the solar panels and power poles designed to transfer solar electricity between the villages.

Updated April 2021, Anat T.

South Hebron Hills, Susiya

Bassel's broken windshield