Off the winding highway, you can see the desert for miles from Hebron Hills. If it weren't for the military outposts, the barbed wire and the checkpoints, it would actually be quite peaceful here - a National Geographic spread waiting to happen. The goats are grazing nearby. Amidst the chaos and the hell, there's still beauty here.

South of Jerusalem, past the checkpoints, this is another section of the West Bank that Israel occupies. Our human rights delegation is making our way to Hebron in an SUV. On the highway going south from Jerusalem you can see the spread of the settlements.

We head off the highway and on to a dirt road where Mosa Abu Gibran, a member of the Fellahin minority working the land today, invites us into his cave for tea with his relatives. There’s a rickety wooden fence and stones shaping the pathway in. He tells us that near here forty houses have been demolished and Apache helicopters fly overhead to protect the nearby settlements. Two days before, a settler knocked down tents in the village.

The security forces have come into villages here and closed off the caves and wells where the Fellahin have lived for centuries. Many, deprived of shelter and water and harassed by settlers and occupation forces, have been forced to move from the land they have called home for centuries.

He tells us that he lives as if he's second class and that he lives in fear of not just security forces, but also militant settlers. He says he’s made to feel like an animal.

We drive on to the nearby settlement of Sausya, a Fellahin village that once had over 125 residents and which now has only about 30 people. The military forces, set up to protect the settlement on the hillside considered to be on Holy Land, look down on the handful of people who are left. Italian human rights activists with "Operation Dove" have been sleeping here for weeks. It wasn't long ago that the Civil Administration destroyed the village well by pushing a car into it and poisoning it with zinc. The security forces are still closing the many caves with stones along Hebron Hills where the Fellahin have traditionally lived. They even destroyed the donated solar panels that had been set up by Bustan to provide some basic level of power to the village for cooking and lighting.

The Nuwaja family, who live in what is left of their village, now number only 26. As they cook in the fire nearby, with only their tents and carpets, they see the security forces with their guns looking down at them from the settlement above, serving as a simple portrait of the Occupation.

The entire Hebron region has been under fire for decades. More recently, in 1999, security forces evicted several hundred Palestinians from the region after declaring it a live-fire area.

In January of 2003, human rights activists who went to the South Hebron Hills region to aid Palestinian farmers plow their land were attacked by settlers. The settlers, armed with guns and stones, beat the activists and pushed a tractor down a valley and stole other equipment that was on it.

Recently, 60 Palestinians from Hebron Hills petitioned the High Court of Justice against the government's intention to confiscate lands for construction of the Separation Wall.

Living here is like embracing madness as a way of life. Everything's always on the edge of unravelling.

Here in the hell of Hebron, they're still fighting over the Promised Land.

From a trip to Hebron in September 2004.

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