The media has been abuzz with the news that Israel "demolished a Palestinian village" in the Jordan Valley this week.
Just finding the village is a challenge.
It is being variously named as "Khirbet Humsa" (which is what B'Tselem calls it) and "Humsa al Bqai’a."
B'Tselem's map points to an area that has absolutely nothing there, at least in the satellite maps I could find.
But Google Maps does find Humsa al Bqai’a, and its satellite map is from November 2013. (The area highlighted is roughly a 100 meter square.)
According to reports, Israel demolished 73 structures in the village. This satellite image shows at most 20 structures, which means that the bulk of this "village" was built since 2013.
Here is that same area in 2010 and 2004:
The images are lower resolution, but it is obvious that the area was completely empty as recently as 2010.
The media doesn't report this, but Palestinians - with full EU support - have been building dangerous, haphazard collections of structures in as many parts of Area C as they can in order to claim as much land as possible. Lots of NGOs obsess over Jews building but these Palestinian land grabs are ignored. There is no reason that these residents couldn't move to Areas A or B, under Palestinian administrative control where they can easily get building permits, but they choose - or are encouraged by the PA and EU - to build in areas Israel needs for security reasons.
In this case, Humsa al-Bqai'a was deliberately built in an area that had been used as an army firing range for many years. Whenever the IDF does training exercises, it has to evacuate these makeshift areas to avoid accidentally hurting or killing the residents - and NGOs report on each incident as if it was deliberate harassment rather than trying to save lives.
The most bizarre claim comes from B'Tselem, which accuses Israel of choosing the date of the American elections to "raze" the tents in order to somehow hide what it was doing. Given the hundreds of articles in major media on this action, it doesn't seem like that nefarious Jewish plan worked.
