Masafer Yatta: ICC urged to prevent Israel committing 'war crime' in West Bank community
The Israeli human rights group B'tselem has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently intervene to stop Israel from expelling Palestinians from their homes and land in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.
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B'tselem wrote to ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan on Monday because they want the Netherlands-based court to "do a preventative intervention, to stop Israel from committing a war crime," Dror Sadot, the group's spokesperson, told Middle East Eye.
Israeli authorities plan to evict some 1,000 Palestinian inhabitants of Masafer Yatta, a rural area in the South Hebron Hills, inEight villages, including four schools, clinics and hundreds of other structures in the area are set to be demolished.
The forcible transfer of residents in occupied territory is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC.
After decades of legal wrangling, Israel's supreme court paved the way for the razing of the villages in May, when it rejected a petition against the eviction of the residents.
David Mintz, a supreme court judge, wrote that the Palestinian petitioners had not successfully proved they had lived in the villages as permanent residents before the army declared the area a training zone in the early 1980s.
"Since then, Israel has escalated its actions - in scope, severity and frequency - against those communities, pushing them out of their homes," Sadot said.
Speaking about why B'tselem had chosen to write to the ICC, Sadot pointed to the court's 2018 intervention regarding the West Bank community of Khan al-Ahmar, which Israel was set to raze.
The ICC warned Israel that destroying Khan al-Ahmar would be a war crime. The community is intact, though the threat of expulsion has not gone away as legal deliberation in Israel over the demolition is still ongoing.
"This is the first time B'tselem has directly asked the ICC for preventative intervention," Sadot said. "After the Israeli Supreme Court ruling it is clear that the Israeli judges are also responsible for those violations and are part of the apartheid mechanism. International intervention is a must." order to create a military "firing zone", or training ground for Israeli forces.
