Displaced Palestinians say IDF, police in contempt of court order to allow them back home
Khirbet Zanuta villagers tell High Court authorities failing to fulfill its ruling to facilitate their return home; legal scholars warn continued displacement may be war crime
Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter
Residents of the West Bank Palestinian village of Khirbet Zanuta have filed a motion to the High Court of Justice seeking a contempt of court order against the IDF, the Israel Police, and the Civil Administration of the Defense Ministry for bringing about what they describe as the second expulsion of the villagers from their homes within a year.
The residents of Khirbet Zanuta fled the village at the end of October 2023 due to persistent attacks against them and the village’s infrastructure during that month by extremist Jews. They returned to their homes on August 21 after the High Court ordered the IDF and police to enable their return and protect them from settler violence.
But they allege that renewed attacks, the refusal of the security services to protect the villagers, and steps by security services that stop the villagers from making Khirbet Zanuta habitable again have led to the depopulation of the village.
The High Court has given the respondents until September 29 to respond to the contempt of court request.
In the request, the village’s lawyers provided photos of settlers from the nearby illegal settlement outpost of Meitarim Farm filming villagers inside their homes and harassing their livestock.
The motion also included pictures of IDF soldiers confiscating blankets used by the villagers to cover their ruined homes and removing fencing erected around the village, which it was argued demonstrated that the security services do not lack manpower in the region and are able to comply with the court order and protect the villagers if there is a will to do so.
The contempt of court request also appended a legal position paper authored by internationally respected Israeli legal scholars who told the court that the conduct of the IDF, police and Civil Administration constituted the forcible transfer of Khirbet Zanuta’s residents, which is illegal under international law and also possibly a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The residents of Khirbet Zanuta fled the village at the end of October following a massive spike in settler violence against Palestinians in Area C of the West Bank — where Israel has military and civil control — in the wake of the October 7 Hamas atrocities. These attacks led to the displacement of over 1,000 Palestinians from rural shepherding communities, particularly in the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.
In the residents’ absence, many of the stone houses in Zanuta were destroyed or damaged and an EU-built school in the village was bulldozed. Law enforcement authorities have failed to identify the perpetrators of the destruction.
On July 29, the High Court ordered the IDF and police to enable the residents to return to their homes, with some of the villagers taking up residence in Khirbet Zanuta on August 21. But less than three weeks later, the Civil Administration informed the residents that it would enforce demolition orders from 2007 against their homes if they did not agree to relocate.
Due to the repeated settler attacks and the demolition threat, the last villagers left Zanuta by September 12.
The stone structures were built in Zanuta by its Palestinian residents in the 1980s after the caves in which they had previously lived began to collapse. These homes are illegal, however, since the village has no zoning masterplan or construction permits, which are in general extremely difficult for Palestinians living in Area C of the West Bank to obtain.
Following years of legal proceedings in the High Court, the state agreed in 2017 not to implement the demolition orders while it drew up new planning criteria.
In its request for a contempt of court order filed on September 18, the Haqel legal aid organization, which is representing the residents of Khirbet Zanuta, alleged that what it described as the “second transfer” of the village’s residents had been carried out “deliberately and with premeditation” by the authorities as well as some eight local settlers.
“During all the weeks in which the residents of Zanuta tried to return to their homes following the High Court ruling, they were persecuted without mercy by the settlers and the respondents, and ultimately were expelled for a second time,” Haqel wrote.
The organization said armed settlers trespassed onto Khirbet Zanuta’s land “and did not stop threatening the residents, attacking them and harming and killing their sheep” since they came back in the middle of August.
Haqel’s request also alleged that the police “totally refused” all requests by the villagers for the settlers to be removed from the village, despite the High Court’s order to police and IDF to protect the villagers.
Instead, it said, the police and IDF told the villagers that the settlers had a right to be present in the village, including in one incident that was caught on camera.
Written requests for assistance to the police were ignored, Haqel attorney and the organization’s co-director Quamar Mishirqi-Assad told The Times of Israel.
“Over 100 incidents of harassment were recorded” in the three weeks between the residents’ return to the village and second exit, “in real time as well as after the fact,” but police failed to respond to any of them, Haqel charged.
The organization also pointed out that the Civil Administration, an agency of the Defense Ministry that runs civilian affairs in the West Bank, repeatedly refused to allow residents of the village to repair homes that were damaged in apparent settlers attacks after they fled the village in October last year.
This included the army confiscating blankets the villagers had spread over their homes to serve as roofs. The residents had removed their homes’ original metal roofs when they first left.
The army also removed netting the residents used for shade.
Haqel said this violated the IDF and police’s pledge to the High Court to allow the villagers to return, which became meaningless if Khirbet Zanuta was uninhabitable due to damage sustained in their absence.
The organization added that the Civil Administration’s notice that it would enforce the demolition orders if the villagers did not agree to relocate demonstrated that the state sought to “complete the expulsion action that the settlers initiated,” and the respondents never had any intention of complying with the court order.
Appended to the contempt request was the position of the Israeli legal scholars, who asserted that the state’s actions constituted forcible transfer under international law. It was authored by five academics, including Prof. Eyal Benvenisti and Prof. Yuval Shani.
Benvenisti was a member of the legal team defending Israel against charges of genocide in the International Court of Justice in The Hague in January this year, while Shani has authored numerous works on international law and served as dean of the Hebrew University’s law faculty.
“Forcible transfer is not only a transfer in which physical force is used. Creating conditions which force people to leave their place of residence also falls under the definition of ‘forcible transfer,’” wrote the professors.
“In the case at hand, after fulfilling their commitment to the court to enable the residents of Zanuta to return to their village, the authorities, by way of action and omission, have created conditions which forced the residents to leave the village,” they continued, saying that this “violated the prohibition against forcible transfer” laid out in Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
There is “a serious concern” that this “forcible transfer” also constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, they added, and said that if the High Court refused to take action against the transfer, the ICC may itself prosecute those responsible.
