Did Israel invent a firing zone to expel Masafer Yatta?

“The Israeli army doesn’t need a mass shooting to justify Palestinian displacement. They just declare an entire region as a military training zone, like for dropping bombs and testing out artillery, giving themselves a legal zoning loophole to attack and displace the Palestinians living in the area.”

The firing-zone system is a real instrument and a heavily criticised one. Closed military and training zones cover roughly a fifth of the West Bank by B’Tselem’s count, they were mostly designated in the first two decades of Israeli control, and the army trains in a small fraction of them. Whether an army should hold that much of a territory it administers for live fire is a serious argument, and it is the argument the residents of Masafer Yatta made.

What the claim does is collapse a 46-year legal history into a trick performed last week.

The dates, in order

1980. The Israeli military declares Firing Zone 918 across about 30,000 dunams of the south Hebron hills, taking in the area of twelve Palestinian hamlets. The state’s position then and since is that the land was used seasonally, by families based in the town of Yatta who moved out to caves and cisterns for planting and grazing.
1999. The army moves to evict more than 700 people as unlawful residents of a firing zone.
2000. Israel’s High Court issues an interim injunction allowing the residents to return and stay while the case is heard. They remain for the next 22 years under a court order against the army.
2000 to 2022. Litigation, mediation attempts, compromise proposals, expert testimony on aerial photographs, tax records and land use, and a proposal by the state to permit seasonal agricultural access.
May 2022. The High Court, in the consolidated petitions under HCJ 413/13, rules against the residents, finding they had not established permanent residence in the area at the time of the 1980 declaration.
March 2025. No Other Land, filmed in Masafer Yatta by a Palestinian and Israeli directing team, wins the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

A loophole is a thing you use once, quickly, because nobody is looking. This is the opposite: a designation made in 1980, tested for a generation in open court by lawyers the residents chose, decided against them, and then filmed for an Oscar.

The film’s own example refutes the film’s own argument

Twenty-eight minutes later, the same documentary asks whether a Palestinian in these villages has any legal remedy against the state and is told:

“Theoretically, yes. In reality, it’s very, very difficult, if not impossible … fundamentally, there really is no recourse.”

The flagship case of the film’s first act is a Supreme Court docket. The residents of Masafer Yatta petitioned Israel’s highest court, obtained an injunction against the Israeli army that held for twenty-two years, and lost on the facts in 2022. Israeli human rights lawyers argued it, Israeli NGOs funded it, and Israeli justices ruled on it, twice, in published opinions that anyone can read.

Losing a case is not the absence of a court. The claim that Palestinians have no legal recourse cannot be made in the same film that spends its first ten minutes on the single most litigated eviction dispute in the West Bank.

Where the real dispute is, and it is not the loophole

The genuine question in HCJ 413/13 is factual and it is close: were these families permanent residents in 1980, or seasonal users of caves who lived mainly in Yatta?

The residents produced aerial photographs, Ottoman and Mandate-era tax records, cave dwellings with cisterns and threshing floors, a school and burial grounds. The state produced its own aerial survey and argued the pattern showed agricultural seasonality. The court preferred the state’s reading, and international legal scholars have argued at length that it applied the wrong standard, since the law of occupation limits what an occupying power may do with land regardless of how residence is classified. That criticism is substantial and it is not answered by pointing at the 1980 date.

But it is an argument about 1980 evidence and the law of occupation, conducted in a courtroom over two decades. It is not the claim being made in the film, which is that the army invents zones as a paperwork trick when it wants a village gone. The trick version travels better because it needs no dates.

The families are still there, and that is because of the court

The most awkward fact for the loophole story is the outcome. The declaration was made in 1980. Evictions were attempted in 1999. It is 2026 and people are still living in Masafer Yatta, filming their own harassment, giving interviews to American documentary crews and winning Academy Awards with the footage. Demolition orders are executed against structures, and the pressure on those communities is real and grinding, which is the thing worth reporting.

What kept them on the land for the middle two decades of that story was an order from an Israeli court against the Israeli army. Any account of Masafer Yatta that deletes the injunction has deleted the only reason there is still a village there to film.