Simra
Palestinian hamlet in the South Hebron Hills (Masafer Yatta)
Khirbet Simra (also: Khirbet Simri, Arabic: خِرْبِة سِمْرِي/سِمْرَة) is a small Palestinian herding hamlet in the South Hebron Hills, within the Masafer Yatta cluster of communities in the Hebron Governorate of the southern West Bank. Like other Masafer Yatta localities, it lies in Area C; since the 1980s much of the surrounding area has been designated Firing Zone 918, constraining planning, services and access. Human-rights documentation describes Simra/Simri as a branch of the nearby Qawawis community that has faced coercive conditions and, at times, abandonment by residents.
Geography
Simra/Simri is part of the dispersed cave-dwelling and herding landscape east of Yatta that comprises Masafer Yatta. Humanitarian profiles describe similar communities as relying on rain-fed cisterns, agricultural tracks between hamlets, and seasonal grazing areas.
History
Simra, like the other Masafer Yatta hamlets, developed as a permanent settlement around caves used for dwelling, storage, and animal shelters. Surveys from the British Mandate period include Simra as one of the Yatta extensions, and archaeological traces such as cisterns and terraces attest to continuous use. Despite its small size, the village is consistently remembered by residents as part of the organic network of hamlets in southern Mount Hebron.
Families in Simra/Simri historically practiced semi-sedentary pastoralism and dryland cultivation, with caves and stone rooms used for housing and storage—patterns attested across the South Hebron Hills. According to B’Tselem, residents of the Khirbet Simri community (linked to Qawawis) were ultimately forced to abandon homes amid a coercive environment of violence and restrictions.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Simra” as palestinian hamlet in the South Hebron Hills (Masafer Yatta). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as palestinian hamlet in the South Hebron Hills (Masafer Yatta). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q136954811. Authority coordinates are 31.391, 35.124. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Simra” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.