“Without warning in the middle of the night, the Israeli High Court of Justice issued a verdict with unprecedented consequences,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which has represented residents throughout the process, said in a statement. .

“The High Court has given official permission to leave entire families, with their children and elderly people, without a roof over their heads,” he said.

Roni Pelli, a lawyer at the association, said the verdict was final and it was unclear if further legal action could be taken. Forced displacement of communities could happen at any time, she told The Associated Press.

The military declared the area a firing and training area in the 1980s. Israeli authorities argued that residents only used the area for seasonal farming and had no permanent structures there. ‘era. In November 1999, security forces evicted some 700 villagers and destroyed homes and cisterns, the association said. The legal battle began the following year.

In its ruling Wednesday night, the Supreme Court sided with the state and said the villagers had rejected a compromise that would have allowed them to enter the area at certain times and farm for a period of time. part of the year.

The military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The families say they have been there for decades, long before Israel seized the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war. They practice a traditional form of desert farming and herding of animals, some living in caves for at least part of the year, but say their only homes are in the toughest communities, now threatened with demolition.

“The occupation court has just decided: my community will be destroyed,” tweeted Basel Adra, a prominent activist from the region. “The army can now place us on trucks, 2,400 people, and expel us from our old villages, one by one.”

The West Bank has been under Israeli military rule for nearly 55 years. Masafer Yatta is in the 60% of the territory where the Palestinian Authority is prohibited from operating. The Palestinians want the West Bank to form the main part of their future state.

Jewish settlers have established outposts in the area that are not officially authorized by Israel but are protected by the army. Last fall, dozens of settlers attacked a village in the regionand a four-year-old boy was hospitalized after being hit in the head with a rock.

Israel has ended plans to formally annex parts of the West Bank in 2020, but it retains overall control of the territory, with the Palestinian Authority administering major population centers and cooperating with it on security issues. Nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, which is home to nearly 3 million Palestinians.

David Mintz, one of the Supreme Court justices who delivered the verdict on Masafer Yatta, lives in the West Bank settlement of Dolev.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett opposes a Palestinian state and regularly refers to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, the biblical name for the region. He and other nationalist leaders see the West Bank as the historic heartland of the Jewish people.

The last serious peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians broke down more than a decade ago. Bennett’s government has ruled out any major move to end the conflict but has taken steps to improve economic conditions for Palestinians.

Three major human rights groups have said that Israel’s policy, particularly in the West Bank, equivalent to apartheidallegations that Israel rejects as an attack on its very legitimacy.

One such group, the Israeli organization B’Tselem, said that in the Masafer Yatta case, judges “have once again fulfilled their role in Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy and paved the way for the crime of forced transfer”.