More than 10 homes demolished in Masafer Yatta in two months

More than 10 Palestinian homes have been demolished in two months in the Deirat area of Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, residents there say, in what they describe as the widest demolition campaign the area has seen in years. Inhabited houses, residential tents, water wells and farm structures have all been taken down, leaving dozens of families without adequate shelter.

Radi Ibrahim Jabr Al-Jabreen lost a house of two floors, each of about 165 square metres, which held three families — some 25 people, among them women and children. His sons and their families lived on the two floors, and he and his wife shared the house with them.

After the demolition notice arrived and the house came down, the family put up a tent and moved into it. About a month later Israeli forces returned, demolished the tent as well and levelled the ground where it had stood, taking away even the temporary shelter. Al-Jabreen called Deirat a "disaster-stricken town", and said that since the demolitions no ministry or official body had come to see the families or work out what they need.

That second demolition is the part worth pausing on. A tent on the rubble of your own house is the cheapest form of staying, and the one thing a family can rebuild without a permit. Levelling the ground under it removes the option rather than the structure.

Sami Al-Harini, an activist with the popular resistance in Masafer Yatta, said the current campaign is the broadest and most intense in years and is running at more than two demolitions a week, a pace he called "frenzied". Every home in the area, he said, now stands at risk of being demolished at any time.

The stated ground for the orders, Al-Harini said, is building without a licence in Area C, the part of the West Bank left under full Israeli control. Residents regard building on land they own as a right, and treat putting up a house on it as part of staying there at all.

Farid Al-Atrash directs the Independent Commission for Human Rights in the southern West Bank. Demolishing people's houses, he said, violates the right to housing directly, and he described that right as a fundamental right recognised internationally and set out in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as part of an adequate standard of living. Adequate housing, he said, means more than a roof: it means living without the threat of displacement.

The commission documents demolitions and their humanitarian consequences and files reports on them under international legal standards, and Al-Atrash said it works to put those cases in front of international human rights organisations. He called on states and those organisations to take steps that actually protect the right to housing.

Masafer Yatta has lived under eviction and demolition orders for years, and the families there have stayed through them. What has changed in the past two months is the rate, and the willingness to come back for the tent.