My name is Zuhour Muhammad Awad, and I am 73 years old. My mother gave birth to me and I opened my eyes to life in Tuba. I have lived a life that is very normal in Masafer Yatta, a life of hard work every day, living in or beside caves, relying on farming and livestock to sustain us. For most of my life, we didn’t think about anything other than this normal life that we are living. Today, I miss this sense of peace of mind and safety that we used to have. Today, everything is very different.
I didn’t go to school, not even for one day. From a very young age, I wandered the mountains of Masafer Yatta by myself. At that time, the lands were very safe and our life was mobile, especially in the summer. My brothers would walk everywhere, searching for grass and water for our sheep. They often walked from Tuba and passed through Wadi al-Suwayd (where the settlement of Susiya is today) and around Qawawees (where the outpost of Mitzpe Yair is today). My family wasn’t worried about me, and there was nothing to worry about .They would sometimes go very far distances, sleeping wherever they were when the sun set, staying away from home for months. As a child, my routine was to go out every day, carrying food and water, until I found where they were with their sheep. We would eat and sleep in the mountains without any fear or hesitation.
Our life was full of tiring and hard work, but it was all very beautiful and simple. It was a life of love and cooperation between the people of this region. We didn’t have modern machines in that life; we were completely dependent on animals and humans to complete the work. We relied on the donkey to plow the land, and the camel to carry the cut barley and wheat when it was time to harvest. We would tie a group of our animals together, let them walk on the dried grain, and mash it into straw. After shaking it in the air to separate the straw from the grains, we would fill it in bags with grain and store them in caves so they would last all winter.
Processing the milk from our sheep is also a central piece of our life in Masafer Yatta. When we milk the sheep and collect the milk, we process it in our traditional, natural way. We place the milk in a suitable temperature, put it in a special bag made of goatskin leather, and hang the bag with ropes to separate out the butter. We cook butter in wheat, until it becomes ghee, and store it in jars for the rest of the year as well.
We also make yogurt from the milk. The yogurt becomes solid from cooking it, and we store it in large canvas bags that maintain the moisture. When it is ready, we divide it into small pieces and shape it. I have always liked the pyramid shape the most. We put the shaped yogurt out in the sun to dry, covering it with canvases to protect it from the direct light and dust. After a few days, the yogurt becomes solid, and we can then collect it and store it inside.
I got married when I was fourteen years old. My husband and I are cousins, so he also grew up in Tuba. My husband’s mother was blind, and he has no brothers and all his sisters are older than him. So once all of his sisters were married and he was busy working, there was no one to take care of his mom. Our families decided that we should get married so that I could stay with them and support his family.
It took us five years until the first pregnancy happened. Unfortunately, we lost our first son. It was my first birth, and there was no doctor to help. The women in the village helped me give birth, but I suffered so much, and by the time I managed to birth him, the baby had already died. After this, I gave birth to nine sons and six daughters in Tuba, all without a doctor. Some were with the help of the women in the village, and some of them just by myself. I’ve spent my whole adult life in the routine of one year pregnant, one year breastfeeding. When I gave birth to my last son, I was 49 years old, just 25 years ago. By that time there was a doctor, but I gave birth to him by myself.
I did all the work to raise my 15 children. They ate the food I produced from our land and our animals. When they were sick, I treated them with the plants and natural medicines from our land. Only if someone was really sick would we go to the hospital. All of my children got married, and some of them have children, and they are living healthy lives.
Today, the world has changed completely. And here in Masafer Yatta, we live in daily terror and under threat of displacement. In 1999, we actually were displaced. Even though we returned to Tuba, all of our homes have demolition orders, the outposts are taking over more and more of our land, and we are unsure what will happen to us in the future. This year, the settlers had taken so much of our land that we could no longer rely on grazing to feed our sheep. We needed to find another way to stay alive, so we bought food for the sheep. A few weeks later, the settlers snuck into Tuba and set 41 bales on fire. The food that was supposed to last for the whole year was burned in two hours.
When I was seven years old and moving all over the area, nothing happened to me, even when I went far from home. A few years ago, my 7 year-old granddaughter, Sujood, went to take a bottle of water to my son, her uncle, just behind the nearby hill. On her way, a group of settlers started chasing her and throwing rocks at her. She fell, and they came closer and hit her in the head directly with a rock.
I hope that my grandchildren will get back the security and freedom that I had when I was a child in Tuba.
My name is Jaber, and I am 34 years old. I live in Khalet al Daba, and I was of course born here too. It was very sweet to grow up here, but since the year 2000, life has become much worse. Growing up, we lived a normal life, like that of any human being. Grazing our sheep and cultivating the land kept us busy.
When I think back on my childhood, I remember how we lived in freedom, away from the business of life. I remember how beautiful it was to live the rhythms of life. I would go out often with my father to graze our sheep. Each season brought its own changes. There was the plowing season, and — my favorite — threshing season. Even though threshing is very tiring, because it comes after a two or three-month period of harvesting wheat, we would get together with our family and friends in order to help each other. When I was young, there were no modern technological machines like we have today. I loved the feeling of sitting next to my father as he winnowed, throwing the grain into the air to separate it from the seeds.
When many residents of Masafer Yatta were evacuated in the 1990s, we in Khalet al Daba were not. I do not know why the army did not force us out; maybe because there was no road leading to Khalet al Daba. Our village was among those that received eviction orders, and we used to see army trucks carrying people’s belongings away from other villages and moving them outside of Masafer Yatta. We stayed here through the period of displacement, until people returned to their villages. I still do not know why the army trucks did not come and force us out of our homes. Perhaps they were so busy displacing the other villages.
But life has remained hard since then. This past week was full of tension, loss, and difficulty, and my brother was injured during a demolition. My home has been demolished many times, most recently some months ago, in April of 2021. After it was demolished, my family and I had to return to living in a cave. Before the demolition, the cave had been a storage room, but today, we all live in it. The cave has become the kitchen, the bathroom, everything. Our life is cramped now. We don’t have enough space to live, and there have been so many losses.
We are the landowners here; we have documents proving it. But even if we merely put up a tent, the army comes and gives a demolition order for it, or even demolishes it without notice. If the people of Masafer Yatta leave their land, the land will be taken over by settlements. But we are here, and we will not leave. We will stay on our land and try to live a decent life here. Because how can the land be taken from its rightful owner and given to someone else?
I remain patient because I never even think about leaving this place. I lost the only shelter I have for myself and my children. But even if I had no cave, even if I were in the open mountains, under heavy rain or the hot summer sun, I would never leave Khalet al Daba.
My name is Mohammad Youssef Makhamri, and I am 18 years old. I live in a village called Al-Mirkiz in Masafer Yatta, with my parents and my four sisters. I am my parents’ only son.
I was born and raised in this place. My childhood was so nice; I was a very active and healthy kid. Every day, I would walk the two kilometres from Al-Mirkiz to the closest school in Jinba and then would come home to help my parents tend to our sheep and our land. I loved this time of my life, running behind my mom while she took our sheep out to graze. I remember noticing all the different colors of the flowers in spring. My mom would collect a bit of wood while we were out in the field to make a small fire to boil tea on. On the burning coals, she would warm the bread she had baked in the tabun oven that morning and eat it with a small amount of yogurt she brought from home. The land is our only livelihood, so we all worked together to take care of it.
I love Masafer Yatta, and I love this village. My family has been connected to this land for generations — my father was born here, and my grandfather inherited this land from his father. Belonging to the land of Masafer Yatta is our identity; it has given us the opportunity to be shepherds, in a quiet space, and to live the only lifestyle we know. My roots are here; I cannot define myself away from this place.
Now that I have finished school, I spend my days working with the sheep. It is less work right now because it isn’t the season when sheep give birth. I just tend to them in the fields and prepare their food at home — that is what my day looks like. When they start to give birth again, I will have to take care of the little ones and help my parents and sisters in processing the milk.
A short distance from our home is an Israeli military base. I have lived my whole life witnessing the soldiers shooting a few meters from where I live. Part of the week, the soldiers shoot throughout the day and night, making it so we can’t sleep. In the morning, we can’t go to the fields to graze because the soldiers either park their tanks on our fields or we are afraid to be shot by a stray bullet.
On January 8, 2021, I woke up to drive the family tractor to the city of Yatta to buy food for our sheep. When I was about to leave, I noticed that our flock had moved a little too far away from the house. It was during the winter, and there was no spring grass yet, so they were looking for food. I followed them, running, trying to bring them back to the barn. I remember that I was running and then fell down, but I can’t remember anything after. I didn’t know what happened to me until I woke up at the hospital. My body was covered in injuries. I looked down at my leg and stomach and saw that I had gotten multiple surgeries. But the biggest shock came when I looked down and didn’t find my right hand.
A grenade had exploded on my body, causing fractures in my right leg. Shrapnel from the explosion had settled millimeters from my heart and stomach. And my right hand was entirely blown off. I stayed in the hospital of Soroka in Beersheba for nine days before I was transferred for treatment to a hospital in the city of Yatta in the West Bank.
My father had been waiting for me in Yatta that day, to come with the tractor to buy the food. My mom didn’t know that I had followed the sheep, so she assumed that I had already taken the tractor and left for Yatta. I was lucky that my neighbor saw me when the grenades exploded, so he called everyone to rush to help me. Otherwise it would have taken more time for me to get help. I could have lost all my blood and died.
It is hard for my family that I am not able to work in the way that I used to. My mom dreams of me getting a prosthetic hand so that, someday, I am able to work and support myself and my family.
My name is Ibrahim Ali Awad and I was born in Tuba in 1942. I inherited our home and our land in Tuba from my great grandfather.
In 1999, the Israeli military evicted 12 villages in Masafer Yatta, including Tuba. I was evicted along with my extended family: nine sons and six daughters, five grandchildren – the youngest of which was born during the eviction. The wife of one of my sons was pregnant with my sixth grandchild. Hundreds of our sheep were also evicted along with my family, thrown homeless out of our land.
So we started to look for a home. At the beginning, we borrowed a cave for us all to stay; however, the cave’s owners told us we could only stay for a month or two, as they would need it by the time winter arrived. So we decided to move and settle on our agricultural lands, three kilometers away from Tuba. We brought some tents with us, including a traditional tent that I inherited from my mother, made from the hair of the goats. We managed to build a shelter for my whole family in one tent, while the sheep were in another. We lived this way every day, only hoping to return to our home in Tuba.
After the evictions, residents from other villages in Masafer Yatta, like Jinba, Al Fakhit, Tabban, Majaz, and others, arranged to meet. We decided to take legal action together, so we could return to our homes.
While I was still lucky enough to have lands to live on in a temporary camp, other residents did not have anywhere else to go. They decided to return to their village while we were preparing the legal case. The Israeli Civil Administration, once again, loaded the residents, their properties, and their belongings up in trucks and drove them away, out of Masafer Yatta.
We also faced trouble from the Israeli Civil Administration. Late in the evening one day, they arrived at our camp, along with a bus full of soldiers, and confiscated our sheep’s tent, our water tanks, and even our food. We were left with not even one piece of bread. My wife remembers that they even took the eggs that I set aside in a jar for the children’s breakfast the next day.
When their trucks left, with all of our belongings, I was left alone to manage my family and our herd in the hills. The March night opened up a very heavy rain, and we had nothing left to shelter us from the elements.
I spent the whole first night trying to control our sheep and collecting small dry wood from the hills to make a fire, so that my children and grandchildren could stay warm. In the morning, my son’s wife went into labor. We were lucky that a person with a car from the nearby city of Yatta rushed her and my wife to the hospital.
This time of year was also the season that the sheep – my family’s only livelihood – also give birth. On the first night, thirty sheep froze to death, including 12 sheep that had just given birth that same night. In the morning, I found all of their baby lambs dead.
The next day, some people donated two tents to us. We moved, again, to another place in a nearby valley and built one tent for us and one tent for the sheep.
Over the next few months, the residents of Masafer Yatta worked together with the lawyers on a legal case for our homes. On the day of the verdict, we arrived at the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem to find that international diplomats, Arab and Jewish Knesset members, and human rights organizations were there to support our case.
A decision was reached. After months of homelessness in the harsh winter cold, after losing some of our sheep and many of our possessions, after suffering from hunger, we forgot it all once we got an interim order to allow us to go back to our homes. Suddenly, the courtroom turned into a party hall.
I headed immediately to my family to give them the good news of our return home. We spent the evening celebrating, and we ate our dinner with happiness. The next morning, we dismantled our camp and headed back to Tuba.
Even though we were allowed to return, since that day we have lived under the threat of expulsion. The court’s decision in 2000 was only temporary. For two decades now, we have not been allowed to build new structures or even fix existing ones. Since the injunction, we have awaited the Israeli High Court’s final ruling, which could throw us out of Tuba for good.
Meanwhile, an Israeli settlement and outpost, built just a few hundred meters from our homes, have taken over all of our pasture land. This takeover is part of a settlement chain that has managed to separate Masafer Yatta from the city of Yatta, and has almost completely isolated our village.
Before the occupation, our lives were simple. We were dependent on our agriculture and livestock, and we ate each plant in its season. Now we wait, under the threat of military expulsion and settler aggression, for the final ruling. All we hope for is to live, as our family, at home in Tuba.
My name is Ali Awad. I was born and raised in the village of Tuba in Masafer Yatta, one of twelve villages that were declared ‘Firing Zone 918’ by the Israeli military.
In 1999, my family was evicted from Tuba by the Israeli military. I lived through this eviction, but I don’t remember anything about it — I was just one year old at the time. So in my mind, it is something that lives in my imagination, in the stories I have heard my whole life. But then I remember that I really lived it. And I am still living it today, 22 years later.
My grandfather remembers every detail of this time, and I have grown up listening to his stories. He talks often about the heavy rain that came after the Israeli military left us homeless. They had confiscated the tents of even the temporary camp that we built after the eviction, so our entire extended family of over twenty people were staying in one tent. They confiscated everything, he says, even the food. It was a very windy and rainy night, and my grandfather spent it making a fire in the tent to keep the family warm. Meanwhile, there were sheep giving birth that night, without a fence or shelter left to protect them. In the morning, my grandfather found that 12 sheep had given birth, and all of their babies had frozen to death in the night.
My mother also gave birth that night to my fourth brother. She suffered in the cold, laboring through the night with no shelter. Luckily, my family got someone with a car to come and rush her to the hospital, through the muddy hills where even fixing roads is prohibited. My mother and little brother thankfully ended the night alive, unlike my grandfather’s little lambs outside.
Thank God, my family was able to return to Tuba in 2000. However, we have since been waiting for the Supreme Court’s final ruling on the status of our land. In the past 21 years, we have lived in fear of being evicted while simultaneously watching the settlements and outposts around us take over more and more of our roads and pasture lands.
My oldest memory is of fear. With the excitement of every house we succeeded to build in Tuba came the fear that it could be demolished at any moment. Everytime someone left the home — to go out shepherding with our flocks, to go to school, to go pick something up in the city — I felt afraid they wouldn’t come back.
Every morning, our family’s worry would begin anew. My father and uncles would leave in the morning to take out their flocks, in an area between our village and the outpost, which had become a regular site of harassment by settlers against my family. We knew that arrest and injury were real threats against shepherds who went out. I remember walking home from school one day in third grade and finding that an Israeli settler had chased my uncle and his flock and had stabbed one of his sheep fourteen times. An Israeli policeman who arrived at the scene casually remarked, “Fourteen stabs are enough to kill fourteen people.” But no justice was ever carried out. Because the sheep had been raised in a Palestinian village, and not an Israeli outpost, it was of no consequence.
When I was three, the Israeli outpost Havat Ma’on was built a few hundred meters from Tuba, directly on the single road that connected us to the rest of the West Bank. Within a year, the settlers began attacking us if we tried traveling on the road, and the military officially closed it off to Palestinian use. The nearest city of Yatta used to be about 3 kilometers from my home. Now, we take a detour of over twenty kilometers to get to Yatta, to access health care, water, and food.
The one exception to the closed road is for children from Tuba to walk on it to the closest school, in at-Tuwani. This was not always the case. At first, the children would hike around the outpost, a commute of over ten kilometers. When I finally started school in 2004, we started to use the road again but eventually had to finish the school year at another far-away school due to continuous settler attacks on the road. It was here, at the age of 5, that my childhood became defined by settler violence.
To solve the problem, the Israeli military decided to send an army jeep to accompany the kids to and from school every day. Instead of dismantling the illegal outpost, or punishing the settlers for their violence, the escort became their solution. I completed all twelve grades in school under military escort. I remember so many days that I arrived late to school, or was not able to attend at all, because the army never showed up. I remember being attacked by settlers, often with the soldiers right there, watching.
This routine consumed my mind and body. Everyday at sunrise and sunset, we were walking. By the time we would get home, our lunch was waiting for us, but it was almost dinner time. When I woke up, I wasn’t hungry for breakfast, and my mind had trouble computing when it was time for dinner. Sometimes it felt like there was just no space for food in my stomach, like I was too full of sadness. My mind wandered from my classes, too preoccupied with the fear of getting to and from school. I lived in a permanent state of movement and disorientation.
Fortunately, I have loved school since first grade. I developed a love for English while studying it as a second language. I learnt from a young age to build basic conversational sentences in English, and I learned some Hebrew, so I could speak with the international and Israeli activists who helped us go to school over the years.
I keep remembering the questions I asked as a child: Why is this our life? Why is this my life? And now, I am watching another generation of Palestinian children be traumatized by stone-throwing, arsonist settlers. They are growing up under the same shadow, their childhoods being defined by settler violence just as mine was. Now, as an adult, I still demand answers. But I refuse to allow terror and injustice to confine me.
Today, I am a writer, a human rights activist, and a university graduate with a degree in English Literature, who hopes to start a postgraduate degree soon. In spirit, I walk on the road to school with the children of my village every day. In the meantime, I am studying, protesting, and documenting, working towards a different, better, safer, and more fair path for us and for all Palestinians.