Violation: Halt of Work notice for a residence and an agricultural facility.

Location: Khirbet Yarza / Tubas governorate.

Date: March 24^th 2021.

Perpetrators: The building Inspector at the Israeli Civil Administration.

Victims: Citizen Salim Masa’ed.

Description:

Wednesday, March 24^th 2021, the construction inspector at the Israeli Civil Administration targeted a residential facility in Khirbet Yarza , through a military order numbered (609) , which orders removing the structure on the pretext of violating an archeological area.

The targeted facilities belong to citizen Salim Masa’ed who supports a family of six, two of them are children:

• A residential tent built of woods and plastic sheets (36 m²).
• Shed used as a barn (28 m²), contains 60 head-of-sheep.
• Barn 90 m².

The affected person has been living in the area for many years, and he depends on cattle breeding as a main source of income, he also holds Tapu papers to prove he owns the land. Masa’ed was shocked of the removal notice, because despite the fact that he was living in the area for a long period of time he has never found any sort of archaeologies.

Photos 1-3: The targeted facilities

Notice number 609 which targets the facilities

Only few meters away from the targeted location, LRC field monitoring team documented the demolition of number of residential and agricultural facilities belong to citizen Rami Masa’ed on the pretext of violating an archeological site , which reflects the occupation’s intention to empty the area for colonialist projects.

A glimpse on Khirbet Yarza:

Khirbet Yarza, located 10 km east of Tubas Governorate, specifically in the Baqi’a Plain region, is inhabited by about 12 families (100 citizens) who are remnants of their original inhabitants previously lived there in hundreds, and taking care of their lands which amounted to 25 thousand dunums, including, 283 dunums, classified under the name “root of the hamlet”, meaning an old inhabited area. It is indicated that 75% of Yarza lands have been registered in the Land Registry records since the Jordanian era, in the name of the Palestinian inhabitants who own the land, but as a result of the occupation’s continuous oppression and racist practices many people were forced to leave to other adjacent places or to the town of Tubas.

Khirbet Yarza is considered one of the “closed military” areas by the Israeli occupation forces. Its lands, totaling 25 thousand dunums, are used as fields for Israeli military exercises, due to the nature of the mountainous and wooded area. On the lands of Khirbet Yarza, there is a training camp for the occupation soldiers called Camp Cobra. There are, also, dozens of training venues spread around here and there, which pose a real threat to the lives of the Khirbat residents. As an inevitable consequence of the existence of these camps, the locals suffer from remnants of the military shells that the occupation forces leave behind, in addition to besieging the hamlet from all sides and preventing the access of the minimum level of life services.

This report was prepared as part of Secure Palestinian Land & Housing Rights project activities

The Contents of this document are the responsibility of LRC and do not reflect EU positions