"[11] Bir el-Eid, which is closest to the Israeli outpost Mitzpeh Yair, report having their cistern vandalized by having an animal carcass thrown into it.

Their appeal is based on the fact that during the Israeli assault on Samu nearby, in 1966, the villagers of Jinba suffered damage, – the UN documented shortly after 15 houses that had been blown up by Israeli forces-and the damage was formally recognized soon after by the Jordanian government, which paid residents compensation for their losses in April and May 1967: 350 dinars per each stone house destroyed; 100 dinars for every killed camel, and seven for each sheep.

Yet the Israeli geographer Natan Shalem, in his book Midbar Yehuda (Judean Desert) in 1931, stated that several villages there were not Bedouin nomadic encampments.

Other evidence attests to the existence of inhabited sites outside Yatta-Jinba, Markaz, Al-Mafkara, Fakhit, Thaban, Al-Majaz, Sarura, Simra, Mughayer Al-Abid, Halawa, Sfei, Rakiz, Tuba, and Khalet a-Daba – long before the occupation.

[13] In September 2021, a mob of approximately 80 to 100 masked Israeli settlers invaded the village of Khirbat al-Mufkara, one of the hamlets that compose Masafer Yatta, throwing stones at houses and damaging cars; 12 Palestinians were injured, including a three-year-old Palestinian child who was hit in the head when an Israeli settler threw a stone at him while he was asleep inside his home.

"[15] [16] In May 2022, the Israeli Supreme Court endorsed the IDF position regarding an area of 3,000 hectares in which 12 Palestinian villages are cited, paving the way for the expulsion of 1,000 residents, which would be the largest deportation since the 1970s.

[8] On 10 May, The European Union[17] said "Settlement expansion, demolitions, and evictions are illegal under international law," and that setting up a firing zone is not an "imperative military reason" for transfer of an occupied population.

[21][22] Ilan Pappé's essay Everyday Evil in Palestine: The View from Lucifer's Hill looks at Masafer Yatta as a case study of the daily occurrences of "incremental colonization, ethnic cleansing, and oppression" that are emblematic of the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people.

[23] Pappé charts the evolution of the efforts to drive Masafer Yatta's residents from the area, from the expropriation of Palestinian land by Israel by means of the World Zionist Organization and the Israeli government's designation of grazing lands as forbidden for human settlement to the more method of driving out the residents by destroying water facilities and declaring surrounding areas as firing zones.