Tag: Demolitions

A day of demolitions: Houses destroyed by JCB vehicles at Abu Nuwar

By Amy Hall, Lydia Noon, Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson from Corporate Occupation

Not content with continuous demolition of school classrooms, the Israeli authorities have now moved on to the demolition of homes in the Palestinian Bedouin community of Abu Nuwar.

Around 8.30am on Wednesday 4 May, Corporate Occupation witnessed Israeli soldiers, border police and representatives of the civil administration arriving in the village, which is in the West Bank district of Jerusalem, and declaring the area a closed military zone.

According to B’Tselem, nine homes were destroyed, along with three farm buildings, leaving 62 people – about half of them children – homeless. Bulldozers made by the British firm JCB were used to demolish buildings as a surveillance drone was flown overhead.

Like Khan al-Ahmar, just down the road, the Bedouin community of Abu Nuwar is being threatened with relocation by Israel. It stands in the way between annexed East Jerusalem and the huge settlement of Maale Adumim which looms over the village. The Israeli authorities plan to build thousands of settlement houses here, in the “E1 corridor”, and further divide the West Bank.

Abu Nuwar, which has around 600 residents, is tucked away behind the main road – a road people can only use by car, massively restricting people from moving with their animals. Before the Apartheid Wall was built, people from Abu Nuwar were able to sell their sheep in Jerusalem, now they can only sell in cities within the West Bank, which they say brings in a much smaller income.

Several demolitions were reported in the West Bank on 4 July. As demolitions in Abu Nuwar took place, the authorities prepared to demolish the village of Khan al Ahmar, home to nearly 200 people. Israeli Civil Administration officials took down barriers at the side of the road to give access for bulldozers and vehicles. Several people were arrested during a protest which blocked a bulldozer from getting through. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favour of demolishing Khan al Ahmar in May, after an international campaign to save the village and its school.

In February 2018, Israeli forces demolished two classrooms of Abu Nuwar’s school, affecting over 25 students. This was the fifth demolition or confiscation of classrooms since February 2016. In April, we interviewed community representative Abu Imad about the community’s struggle for survival. We spoke inside Abu Nuwar’s community centre which was being used as a temporary classroom for the third grade.

Why is this building now being used by the school?

An order declaring a closed military zone

We are forced to use it because of the demolition of the classrooms.

The closest school to this community was 2km away. There is no transportation and there is no good road. It’s very tiring for children to make it the whole way – children as young as five or six years old. In collaboration with some associations in the European Union (EU) we established the kindergarten and we got an order from the court that prevents the occupation from demolishing it.

Since then we have built many classrooms for the school which have been demolished or confiscated. We have been working with our lawyer and going to the Israeli court try and stop this happening.

The most recent demolition was on 4 February 2018. They did it between 2.00am and 5.00am and they used JCB machines. When they come to demolish they close the entire area and make it a closed military zone.

The remains of a classroom in Abu Nuwar, after February’s demolition

What support have you had from international governments and NGOs?

There is always logistical support from organisations providing us with water tanks. They just provide us with material to be demolished again. They try to put pressure on the occupation to stop these practices but it’s not enough. They are always shy when talking to the occupation.

We had welcomed a lot of groups of British politicians as well and we asked them to support us with a bus for students, but they have not tried to help.

Our fight is to keep presence on the land in the first place. Even though nowadays our options are getting narrower. Internationally speaking we can see that there are many countries supporting the state of Israel and we can predict that we will be living in more enclosed and pressured situations in the future.

It’s frustrating and depressing. We have many international agreements that Palestinians have the right to live peacefully and safely and they don’t respect these laws at all.

For three years they have been trying to make us willingly leave. The Civil Administration said they would give us money to leave. We didn’t even open the door to ask how much, but they seem to be ready to pay anything.

Ethnical cleansing in the Jordan Valley

26th November 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, Team Nablus  | Jordan Valley Solidarity | Jordan Valley, Occupied Palestine
Israeli forces have sent out demolition orders to two villages in the northern Jordan Valley, where they plan to demolish the homes of around 300 Palestinians. This is part of the Israeli military’s ongoing efforts ethnically cleanse the Jordan Valley and annex it to Israel.
The Jordan Valley Solidarity group has already reported residents overhearing drones gliding over the area and Israeli soldiers frequently halting residents for ID checks.
The village Al Maleh is situated close to a Israeli military base.
The Ein El Hilwe and Al Maleh families’ stories are a perfect example of what life in Jordan Valley can mean. None of the two families have been directly informed by the Israeli military forces about the plans to demolition of their homes. On the 1st of November, the demolition orders were left in the form of a note under a rock close to their homes. The notes weren’t noticed until the 9th, which meant that they had an even shorter period of time to find a solution. Despite the frustration and the difficulties of the last weeks, the residents of both the villages are determined to stay on their land and to face the harassment of the Israeli occupation forces. “My grandfather and my father both lived here before me and before the Israeli occupation. My family has owned this land for so long”, says Qadri Daram from Ein El Hill village, descrbing the constant harassment his family has had to face for decades. “They have been using the same strategy for years to get the Palestinians out of here. But before the Oslo agreement there were more military bases here and soldiers. Then the soldiers went away and the Israeli settlers arrived.”
Qadri and his family have lived on this land for generations. Now he and his wife and children have to face many difficulties. They are not allowed to build anything on their own land and are forced to live without water and electricity, while the illegal Israeli settlement nearby is equipped with all the comfortabilities they need. The water for the settlement is taken from a local spring standing near to Ein El Hilwe, while Qadri and his family have to buy water.
The area has been declared a closed military zone.
Qadri used to get the water for his community from there, but when the settlers came they started using it as a swimming pool, claiming it was a holy spring, which made the water dirty and undrinkable.
The water source is an ongoing issue, and has been used as a weapon by Israel since 1967, when it took control of Palestinians’ water supply.
The ways Israel tries to hinder the Palestinian access to water are many. The state often prohibits any kind of maintenance or improvement of the hydric system, draining the groundwater sources from deeper sites. It enables the damaging and drying up of the more superficial Palestinian water sources.
The ways Israel tries to hinder the Palestinian access to water are many. The state often prohibits any kind of maintenance or improvement of the hydric system, draining the groundwater sources from deeper sites. It enables the damaging and drying up of the more superficial Palestinian water sources. It allows untreated sewage to flow from settlements onto Palestinian land. It drains the sources throughout the settlement water system. It targets the water infrastructure during military attacks. It confiscates or destroys tanks for rain collection. Finally, it tolerates and sometimes encourages direct sabotage by the settlers, such as the chemical poisoning of Palestinians’ water and the damaging of their personal tanks and structures.
The Palestinians in the area have to buy water for both themselfs and their animals. The local water spring leads up to the nearby settlement and army bases.
In addition to the weaponization of water, Israel has used military firing zones as a way to annex Palestinian land. Those who drive along the road from Tubas can see warning signs every few meters, declaring the adjacent land a firing zone. This is how the Israeli army declares that particular areas are for live weapons military training, despite the fact that Palestinian villages exist on them, many of which are forced to evacuate with no redress or compensation. Because of these continuously increasing restrictions on their movement, shepherds have been experiencing more difficulty finding places to herd their goats, forcing them to buy feed for them, a far more expensive and less healthy alternative.
Qadri’s story is just one of many stories Jordan Valley residents can tell, as the situation has been getting steadily worse since the occupation began in 1967. Before 1967, over 320,000 Palestinians were living in the Jordan Valley. Now, the number is around 60,000.
“Our children don’t even have the right to enjoy life,” Qadri says. “They cry during the night. They are scared. I think every child in the area needs a psychologist.”
In the village Al Maleh, the situation is similar. The future is uncertain, but everybody is determined to resist on their rightful land. The families listen desperately to the news everyday, waiting for answers. And now, they’re asking the international community for help and solidarity in their search for a peaceful and safe existence.

A Tale of Zero Cities

11th November 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Um al-Khair, Occupied Palestine

Last month in northern Palestine brought stories of Israeli settlers from the illegal Yitzhar settlement that, however horrifying, all suffered an important shortcoming: the scope of the stories lent to individual scapegoats, and in doing so provided a vivid, but ultimately penny-deep look at the Palestinian condition. Today’s news is flooded with such dramatic examples.

This past month, I lived in and began to learn the story of Um al-Khair, a Palestinian Bedouin village in the South Hebron Hills. Again the case presented a challenge of conveyance – perhaps even more so. While it’s certainly every bit as troubled as the villages in the shadow of the Yitzhar settlement, Um al-Khair’s story is much less made for TV than the photogenic, headline-grabbing brutality of physical violence.

There’s no getting around it: it’s a small village, and reversing the injustices there wouldn’t move the needle on injustice in Palestine a whole lot.

However, it does offer itself as a worthy placeholder – an exemplary microcosm for the nation of Palestine, and what happened, is happening, and will happen to it if nothing is done.

Tariq (left) and Eid Hathaleen, with Tariq’s nephew Muhammad in his arms. Tariq’s house, which he shares with his mother, has been demolished 3 times already (’08, ’12, and ’14). Eid recently had both of his cars, one less than a week old, confiscated by the Israeli army. A tattered – but still standing – Palestinian flag waves behind them.

This isn’t to say that tragic physical violence doesn’t occur there. One of the first stories new visitors hear is that of a resident who, as his brother Tariq says, “lost his life without losing his life.” About 17 years ago the young man, Muhammad, was herding his goats and – so claimed a settler – ventured onto a far corner of settlement property. An Israeli soldier chased him down (after the fact and within his own village), and beat him most of the way to death for it. Today, the man who would’ve been one of the leading breadwinners for the village walks the roads mentally handicapped, unable to contribute to the survival of the community. As the soldier was leaving the village that day, he turned and pointed at Muhammad in the dirt – the young man already having left his body for the last time – and shouted “Look at your brother, let him be an example! I’ll make every single person in this village handicapped!”

As it turns out, the soldier didn’t have to. Seventeen years later, the pen would prove mightier than the sword, and the true kneecapping of Um al-Khair would come not in the form of an excessively forceful soldier, the optics of which might provoke international outrage, but rather bureaucratic, pseudo-legal land-grab policies.

To that end, in the 17 years since the martyrdom of Muhammad, by far the most high ranking targets of the Israeli army in Um al-Khair have been peaceful, inanimate objects – their traditional Bedouin oven, among the kind of objects Pierre Nora coined “les lieux de mémoire” in 1989, as well as a proposed community garden – the first of which has been built or rebuilt and subsequently destroyed 3 times over, and the other disallowed before construction could even begin (though there’s an international campaign to support it anyway).

As Tariq, a budding community leader, said, “The soldiers that try to break us aren’t enemies of terrorism. They don’t like us, but even they know we are not terrorists. They are enemies of life. They are enemies of our presence here. Look at the oven, the garden.”

The future of Um al-Khair. Their demands are simple: to live in peace, which means an end to the ongoing demolition of their homes, as well as an end to settler violence against them during the night.

Clearly the real threat isn’t any one person, but anything palpable for Palestinians to hold on to, and with it the motivation to continue resisting. Homes, homelands, even ovens and community gardens are brought to ashes – as Israel admits with shameless candor – to make room for people of a different ethnicity.

Taken together, what happened to Muhammad the individual and what’s happening to Um al-Khair’s lifeblood structures span the spectrum of violence, from physical to structural. Though they’re specific to Um al-Khair, they speak volumes about the post-1948 Palestinian story.

The notion that a bread oven or community garden could be threatening should be preposterously silly and, at the same time, make all the sense in the world when the very acknowledgement of a Palestinian people is threatening to an ideology whose implementation required their ethnic cleansing. After all, one of the most repeated go-to’s for stewards of Zionism – that Palestine was “a land without a people” – reveals itself as the only option short of confronting the question of what happened to those people, and who was responsible.

The result was that incorrect and racist revision: pre-1948 Palestine – a rich bastion of culture, cuisine, art, music, academia – was really a land of zero cities. After all, it didn’t even have a people.

Suleiman Hathaleen, the elder in Um al-Khair, himself 6 years older than Israel. Born in Arad, Palestine (now Arad, Israel), he was made a refugee in 1948, and has lived in Um al-Khair since.

Of course, any rational person knows that Palestinians do exist, and that they didn’t come to Palestine simply to meet the arriving Jewish immigrants with weapons. Sentient, living evidence for this – for the bustling Palestinian society and what happened to it – exists in refugee camps in- and outside of Palestine to this day.

Since 2007, roughly 20 families from Um al-Khair have joined them, after the State of Israel – not a rogue extremist, not an individual settler, but the real-life manifestation of Zionism – has come to their village to make them homeless. This, unfortunately, is what defines the struggle at large for many indigenous Palestinians – to stay and survive at all under the threat of expulsion and extermination. There’s been virtually no evidence even of an attempt to maintain a second-class, exploitable Palestinian population, making this – what’s occurring in the West Bank and Gaza as opposed to the State of Israel – not apartheid, but unvarnished ethnic cleansing.

The ruins of a family’s demolished home in Um al-Khair.

And so, ceding for a moment the possibility that Um al-Khair’s situation is controversial, the fact remains that the international community has yet to be told what justifies it. What justifies the fact that the people with the deed to the land, who’ve lived completely without sin and within the law, are forced to stand there crying out for help, physically weak from humankind’s deepest sadness – the gutting, emptying kind that you feel in your body – as a Caterpillar D9 military bulldozer thunders to life and starts towards their home.

CALL TO ACTION: Salfit under brutal settlement expansion

Bil’in weekly demonstration, 17th Feb. 2017

11th April 2017  |  International Solidarity Movement  |  Occupied Palestine

Since the beginning of the year, the Salfit municipality in the occupied West Bank (Palestine) has become a target not only for illegal settlement expansion and growth but also for the imposition of serious restrictions to the daily lives of Palestinians.

For a long time the Salfit area has been subjected to land theft, the uprooting of olive trees and the pollution of the area’s water supplies, as a result of Israeli-led excavations and the dumping of untreated wastewater coming from illegal settlements. These actions produce severe damage to Palestinian crops and to water sources essential for the livestock, and restrict Palestinians’ access to their lands and means of livelihood, by constraining agricultural activity or transforming agricultural land into natural reserves.

Since 2017 started, the Salfit area has received 30 orders to stop construction work and 3 notifications for land evacuation. On March 23, in Wadi Qana, a village west of Deir Istiya and surrounded by illegal settlements, Palestinian farmers were prohibited to access their lands by the Israeli forces, who justified it with the need to create a “comfortable atmosphere” for the settlers. Two weeks later, on the same area, with no prior notice, 135 olive trees were uprooted, after being described as “damaging to the view and values” of the nature reserve. In total, 165 trees have been uprooted in the Salfit area since the beginning of the year.

Furthermore, in two cases (both in Salfit municipality and Bruqin), municipality crews’ work that would allow Palestinians access to their agricultural lands was stopped by Israeli forces, and 100 dunums of Palestinian land were confiscated in order to expand an industrial zone around illegal Israeli settlements or to build new roads connecting these illegal settlements to Jerusalem and Israel.

As the lives of the Palestinians living in this area continue to be deeply affected by the intensifying attacks against their mobility and access to their lands, they still challenge them by organizing popular demonstrations, solidarity vigils and working with human rights organisations.

Support by the international community, both abroad and in occupied Palestine is still necessary. ISM urges you to denounce the situation by:

  • Exposing the practices of the occupation in international forums;
  • Contacting your state authorities and pressuring them to halt relations and cooperation with the occupying state as per BDS guidelines;
  • To share the stories of Palestinians affected by the reality of the occupation and the violation of their basic human rights;
  • To visit Palestine in a demonstration of solidarity;
  • To support the right of the Palestinian people to nonviolently resist occupation, as a right enshrined in international law.

If you wish to join the International Solidarity Movement please contact your nearest support group for a briefing (see our website, bottom-right corner). If you are currently in the UK, please note that a training session will be held in Manchester on the 22nd and 23rd of April.

Israeli forces demolish Palestinian farm in Abu al-Ra’eesh, west of Salfit

5th April 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, Ramallah team | Abu al-Ra’eesh, occupied Palestine

Israeli forces demolish residential tents and livestock pens in Abu al-Ra’eesh

On the morning of April 5, 2017, the Israeli occupation forces demolished residential tents and six sheep pens in the area of Abu al-Ra’eesh, southwest of Dirbolut, west of Salfit.

The structures belonged to the Shheibar family and were located between the villages of Deir Balout and al-Lubban. They were forcefully removed by Israeli forces, who ordered the owner to remove the remaining structures within a week. According to the owner, Mohammad Shheibar, the demolition order was only issued three days ago.

 

2016 saw an average of 156 Palestinian structures a month demolished by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, displacing over 1,500 people and destroying the livelihoods of another 7,000. Meanwhile, building permits are frequently granted to the 550,000 colonial Israeli settlers in occupied West Bank, and Israeli authorities remain intent on expanding the nearby illegal settlement of Elqana.