how to delete a hatch island?!

i opened up a drawing which had a hatch over an area, and after deleting some text from within the hatch extents, found that the hatch didn't ignore the text & put the hatch behind it, rather, it created an island around the text to avoid a hatch/text clash.

I've removed a few pieces of such texts, and now have a bunch of rectangular holes in my hatch where the texts used to be.

How can I remove these islands completely without having to rehatch the whole thing again?

(I realise I could simply minimise the size of the island by picking the four corners/vertices of the hatch and bringing them closer together, but this is a messy solution)

Thanks in advance

Have you tried turning off island detection?

If you don't want to turn off islands entirely, you can edit the hatch. Click the button "Remove boundaries" (it's greyed out in the window above). You'll see borders around the spaces where the text objects were. Select the borders you want to remove. When you exit the hatch edit window, the holes should be gone.

Another solution is to use multitext objects with background masks. That way the hatch is hidden underneath them, but the hatch itself doesn't have to be changed. Very handy if the hatch appears in some viewports where the text doesn't.