Hundreds of Palestinians move into caves
Villagers resist Israeli efforts to displace them
KHIRBET AL-FAKHEIT, West Bank — Faced with expulsion from their villages and the demolition of their homes by Israeli authorities, hundreds of Palestinians are trying to stay by reverting to an older form of shelter: living in underground caves.
“We have no home to live in and no tent — we have no option but to live in the cave,” said Wadha Ayoub Abu Sabha, 65, a resident of the village of Khirbet alFakheit, in a rural area of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that the military is planning to seize. “The beginning of my life was in the cave, and the end of my life will be in the cave.”
The residents of Abu Sabha’s village and surrounding herding communities, whose forbears long lived in the caves that dot the area, have been fighting efforts to displace them from homes where their families have lived for decades. Some have deeds to their land from before the modern establishment of Israel in 1948.
But in May, the Israeli Supreme Court approved the expulsion of some 1,200 Palestinians in the villages so the Israeli army could use the land for a live-fire military training ground. That could set the stage for one of the biggest mass expulsions of Palestinians since 1967, which the United Nations says could amount to a war crime.
Residents in the villages scattered across the rolling hills in the area known as Masafer Yatta have been waiting anxiously to see what happens — and preparing their caves.
Israel says that the Palestinians living there were not permanent residents, and that it has the right to declare the area a closed military zone. Israeli authorities have long demolished homes and other structures in the area, citing violations such as a lack of building permits, which the Israeli government rarely gives to Palestinians. The residents have always rebuilt.
But after the third time Abu Sabha’s home was demolished, her family moved temporarily into an unused clinic and began readying a cave under their village to live in.
Abu Sabha’s cousin, Inshiraah Ahmad Abu Sabha, 58, walked into the cave recently, seemingly upbeat, as if she were playing the part of interior decorator on a reality TV home makeover show.
“This needs work,” she said, waving toward the stone walls and suggesting the addition of a row of shelves. Looking up at the low, cobwebbed ceiling, from which an electric light hung, she said, “It needs a vent up there.”
Sitting on a boulder and wearing a purple robe and a red and white kaffiyeh as a hijab, the cousin looked over at the smallest of the three areas of the cave.
“That’ll be a room for Zainab,” she said, turning to Abu Sabha’s 3-year-old granddaughter, who was playing on the dirt floor. “What do you think, Zainab? A room for you?”
Ahmad Abu Sabha remembers what the caves used to look like in her adolescent years when her family last lived in them. In the 1980s, residents moved above ground, first erecting tents and then, in the 2000s, building homes.
“They say we weren’t here before the ’80s, but I was born here in 1964 in another cave,” she said.
The Israeli military declared much of Masafer Yatta a restricted firing zone in the early 1980s, saying it had characteristics that no other area had, according to a court decision in the army’s favor. Israel has long maintained that Palestinians in the area were not permanent residents before that designation.
Beyond the demolitions, Israel has engaged in what the United Nations calls “coercive measures” to make life difficult for Palestinians in the area, confiscating vehicles, restricting access by aid groups, and setting up checkpoints between villages that can make it difficult for children and teachers to reach schools, local leaders and aid groups said.
“Forcible transfer is contrary to the Geneva Conventions, and transfer does not always mean packing people up in trucks and taking them away,” said Noa Sattath, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. “A slow mistreatment of the population in order to motivate them to leave is also considered forced transfer.”
Under the Oslo Accords, the 1990s peace agreement that was supposed to lay the path for Palestinian statehood, two-thirds of the West Bank fell under what was supposed to be temporary Israeli control. Israel was meant to gradually withdraw from most of that area and transfer control to the Palestinians.
Instead, Israel has maintained its military occupation and allowed the building and expansion of settlements, illegal under international law, in the area it controls while pushing Palestinians out. Palestinians say this represents a creeping annexation of the West Bank.