On Sunday 8 February, the Israeli army and border police demolished Fatima Alyan Daraghmeh’s home in Ein El Hilwe, where she has lived for 50 years.
As well as flattening her entire house with bulldozers they also completely destroyed her full water containers, smashed up her solar panels, her generator and her bathroom cubicle.
As she sat amidst the remains of all of her belongings, she shared that her home was beautiful, that it was full of memories of her family and she is still trying to find all of their photos.
Fatima lives alone and she has limited use of her hands which are swollen and her joints have seized up. She can’t afford to pay for medication for her diabetes which is making her sick.
She is now living in a tiny tent next to her demolished house. There she sleeps with the few belongings she has managed to salvage from the rubble. The army destroyed everything she needs to survive, and she shared her distress about having no way to make food, nothing to protect her from the sun, no gas and no fire.
When the demolition crew arrived they told Fatima, who was crying and begging them to stop, to shut up and that there was no place for her to live here and she should go and live in the nearby city of Tubas.
This is a blatant example of the co-ordinated ethnic cleaning campaign by the Israeli government, the army, police and the settlers to forcibly displace Palestinians from the Jordan Valley into the neighbouring cities so that they can continue to separate and isolate Palestinians from one another. Like most of the families living in the Jordan Valley, Fatima has made her living through agriculture and keeping sheep. Most of these families will struggle to have any income.
