Israeli Press
Ynet hears Masafer Yatta families after Israel razed their entire village
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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"Not a single room, pen, water line or electrical network remained," Fallah Hamoud told the Israeli news site Ynet after the Civil Administration demolished Khirbet al-Tabban in Masafer Yatta, in the southern Hebron hills, on Wednesday. "They entered from the north and left from the south."
Ynet's correspondents Einav Halbi and Idan Blumhoff reported that the bulldozers took every residential structure in the community: homes, storage rooms, water cisterns, sheep pens and the caves families used as dwellings. About seventy people from twelve families lived there, twenty-eight of them children.
The army's line, and the court behind it#
The army told the site that the structures were built illegally inside a firing zone and that it "will continue operating to strengthen security and maintain order in Judea and Samaria," its term for the occupied West Bank, "emphasizing enforcement of structures that harm regional security and stability."
Firing Zone 918 covers about 35,000 dunams and has been designated a training area since the early 1980s. Israel's High Court rejected the residents' petitions in May 2022, clearing the way for eviction, and Ynet placed Wednesday's demolition inside that ruling.
Muhammad Hamamdah, another resident, called it "the demolition of the entire village: caves, rooms, wells, sanitation units and livestock pens." The families told the site they would rebuild and stay "until our last breath."
What the Israeli coverage adds#
The report is notable for what an Israeli mass-market outlet chose to carry: the residents' words at length, the children's count and the scale of the loss, beside the army's statement rather than beneath it.
The Israeli rights group B'Tselem told The National that al-Tabban is the sixty-sixth Palestinian community forcibly emptied since 7 October 2023, and the largest single demolition in Masafer Yatta since May 2025. Ynet did not carry that figure. Neither the Civil Administration nor the defence minister, who oversees it, said where the seventy people were expected to go.
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