Will he try to build his house a third time? He shrugged, the mammoth task one he is apparently not yet willing to contemplate. "The system is rigged against us," he said.
The interior ministry, which oversees building permits, was unavailable for comment. Government officials, however, regularly claim that Palestinian citizens like Khatib are refusing to abide by planning rules and prefer to build illegally.
Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), said thousands of Palestinian families in Israel were trapped in what he termed the same "matrix of control" that operates in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where demolitions also regularly take place.
"People are surprised that Israel demolishes three times more homes inside Israel, against its Palestinian citizens, than it does in the occupied territories," he told MEE. "The number of demolitions in Israel undermines the idea that the policy is simply a problem of the occupation."
ICAHD, he said, had launched a new campaign called "Judaising Palestine" to emphasise that Israel's goal was confinement and displacement of all Palestinians wherever they were living in historic Palestine.
Despite a slow-down in Jewish immigration in recent years, Judaisation is still being actively pursued.
In late 2013, the Jewish National Fund, an international Zionist charity with semi-governmental status, announced it would invest $1 billion over the next decade to encourage 250,000 Jews from the US and Europe to move to the Galilee and Negev.
Jewish-only communitiesThe land and housing problems faced by Israel's Palestinian citizens, note experts, have a long history that started in the immediate wake of the 1948 war that established Israel as a Jewish state.
Israel confiscated most of its new Palestinian minority's lands, as well as that of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians freshly made refugees. It then nationalized 93 percent of its total territory on behalf of worldwide Jewry.
Israel built hundreds of rural, land-hungry communities for Jews, including farming collectives like the kibbutz, that exclude Palestinian citizens through admission committees, said Swaid.
The Palestinian minority has been mostly confined to some 130 separate communities occupying just 2.5 percent of Israel's land.
"While over 1,000 new Jewish communities have been established [since Israel's creation], not a single Arab settlement has been authorized," notes the website of Adalah, a legal centre for Israel's Palestinian minority.
The Or Commission, an Israeli judicial-led inquiry, concluded in 2003 that systematic discrimination in land and housing had been a major cause of unrest in the Galilee three years earlier. Israeli police shot dead 13 unarmed Palestinian citizens and wounded hundreds more during demonstrations in Israel at the start of the second intifada.
The commission observed that waves of massive land expropriations had been viewed by the Palestinian minority as a "dispossession enterprise." Despite a sevenfold increase in the Palestinian minority's numbers since the state's founding, it added, zoning for residential areas had barely increased.
Destroyed 80 timesThe picture in Israel's south, in the semi-desert Negev, is particularly extreme, Maysanna Morany, a lawyer with Adalah, told MEE.
There, several dozen Bedouin villages have been unrecognized by the state and 10,000 homes are automatically under threat of demolition.
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