On Friday, the 27th of March at 1.30pm, Aqraba village, southeast of the city of Nablus, will hold a festival of popular resistance in response to recent house demolition orders issued by Israeli authorities.
The festival will take place in the Aqraba high school.
Aqraba village was given demolition orders last month for 15 structures, including homes, barns, a mosque and a water well. These structures are situated on the outskirts of the township, in an area known as Khirbit Al Taweel.
Israeli authorities want to displace the residents of Khirbit Al Taweel, which is located in Area C, under direct Israeli military control. The Israeli military has informed the owners of the 15 structures that they have until the 26th of March to evacuate their homes.
The festival, organized by the Aqraba municipality, the Agricultural Popular Committees, and the Local Council for Popular Resistance, will draw attention to the recent rise in home evictions and demolitions orders throughout Palestine.
A resident of Shiekh Jarrah, a neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem facing mass evictions, will speak about the shared struggle Palestinian communities face under Israeli occupation policies.
Israeli forces blocked off the Gilo road beside Bait Safafa Tuesday as soldiers prepared to destroy the sixth floor of a multi-family home in East Jerusalem.
Demolition began in the late hours of the morning, with crews removing the tile roof of the building and knocking down walls on the Ar-Rakhma street building. The demolition stalled when demolition workers attempted to dismantle the elevator to the top floor. Eyewitnesses said several methods of destruction were attempted, but none have yet been successful.
Earlier in the day armed soldiers blocked the entrances to both the Gilo and Beit Safafa streets, prohibiting press from entering the area and warning residents that if they leave with their cars they will not be permitted to re-enter the area. Others are able to enter the area but only on foot.
Soldiers have prevented those who live in the building from coming within 200 meters of the site. Those who wish to remove personal items from their homes in advance of the demolition are being removed from the area.
The six-story building belongs to Mahfoudh Abu Khalaf, who is reportedly refusing to leave the building, which houses 50 people, from several different families. Some were seen taking suitcases and furniture out of the building.
The first three floors of the building were built with permits, but the fourth, fifth and sixth were denied permits and are considered illegal. The sixth floor is home to seven people.
Israeli soldiers told locals that only the sixth floor will be destroyed Tuesday, though the other two have demolition orders pending. They have been assured that special equipment will be used to ensure that only the top floor of the building will be destroyed.
Witnesses said it was likely the demolition would damage the other floors of the home.
Six homes in the village of A’qraba have received eviction orders. 14 homes in the area received similar orders in 2008.
Among those houses slated for demolition is an electricity station, a mosque, a well and two houses for animals.
The villagers in the area believe that this is an attempt by the Israeli government to remove all Palestinians who are now living in ‘Area C’ (close to the Jordan River) to ‘Area B’, to make room for settlement expansion.
Israel plans to demolish six homes and a mosque in the villages of A’qraba and Kherbet At-Taweel, both south of the West Bank city of Nablus, residents said on Sunday.
Officials representing the Israeli military handed over demolition orders to the residents in question, they added, announcing their intentions in the West Bank villages.
According to Yaser Suleiman, the coordinator for the Nablus-area Agricultural Committee, “the occupation is working to force residents out of the village.”
“Repeated attacks on homes, demolition warnings, and settler attacks have killed four Palestinians over the past few years,” he added, noting that the Palestinians killed by settlers were first abducted before their alleged murders.
Musa Derieyah, an official with the Agricultural Action Committee, said that A’qrabas is surrounded by four illegal settlements, Gatit, Ma’leh AFraim, Itamar and Majdulim, where “90 percent of the lands were confiscated.”
He added that “repeated settler attacks have become unbearable,” as planted explosive charges have killed one Palestinians and injured another child.
Settlers have attacked the residents of the village while they graze sheep near the illegal settlements, while other areas are totally isolated, and Palestinians are not permitted to enter, Deriyeah added.
40-year-old Palestinian Mahmoud al-Abbasi stands amid the rubble of his home after it was demolished by the Jerusalem municipality in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Photograph: Gali Tibbon
7 March 2009
A confidential EU report accuses the Israeli government of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank barrier as a way of “actively pursuing the illegal annexation” of East Jerusalem.
The document says Israel has accelerated its plans for East Jerusalem, and is undermining the Palestinian Authority’s credibility and weakening support for peace talks. “Israel’s actions in and around Jerusalem constitute one of the most acute challenges to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making,” says the document, EU Heads of Mission Report on East Jerusalem.
The report, obtained by the Guardian, is dated 15 December 2008. It acknowledges Israel’s legitimate security concerns in Jerusalem, but adds: “Many of its current illegal actions in and around the city have limited security justifications.”
“Israeli ‘facts on the ground’ – including new settlements, construction of the barrier, discriminatory housing policies, house demolitions, restrictive permit regime and continued closure of Palestinian institutions – increase Jewish Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, weaken the Palestinian community in the city, impede Palestinian urban development and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank,” the report says.
The document has emerged at a time of mounting concern over Israeli policies in East Jerusalem. Two houses were demolished on Monday just before the arrival of the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and a further 88 are scheduled for demolition, all for lack of permits. Clinton described the demolitions as “unhelpful”, noting that they violated Israel’s obligations under the US “road map” for peace.
The EU report goes further, saying that the demolitions are “illegal under international law, serve no obvious purpose, have severe humanitarian effects, and fuel bitterness and extremism.” The EU raised its concern in a formal diplomatic representation on December 1, it says.
It notes that although Palestinians in the east represent 34% of the city’s residents, only 5%-10% of the municipal budget is spent in their areas, leaving them with poor services and infrastructure.
Israel issues fewer than 200 permits a year for Palestinian homes and leaves only 12% of East Jerusalem available for Palestinian residential use. As a result many homes are built without Israeli permits. About 400 houses have been demolished since 2004 and a further 1,000 demolition orders have yet to be carried out, it said.
City officials dismissed criticisms of its housing policy as “a disinformation campaign”. “Mayor Nir Barkat continues to promote investments in infrastructure, construction and education in East Jerusalem, while at the same time upholding the law throughout West and East Jerusalem equally without bias,” the mayor’s office said after Clinton’s visit.
However, the EU says the fourth Geneva convention prevents an occupying power extending its jurisdiction to occupied territory. Israel occupied the east of the city in the 1967 six day war and later annexed it. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
The EU says settlement are being built in the east of the city at a “rapid pace”. Since the Annapolis peace talks began in late 2007, nearly 5,500 new settlement housing units have been submitted for public review, with 3,000 so far approved, the report says. There are now about 470,000 settlers in the occupied territories, including 190,000 in East Jerusalem.
The EU is particularly concerned about settlements inside the Old City, where there were plans to build a Jewish settlement of 35 housing units in the Muslim quarter, as well as expansion plans for Silwan, just outside the Old City walls.
The goal, it says, is to “create territorial contiguity” between East Jerusalem settlements and the Old City and to “sever” East Jerusalem and its settlement blocks from the West Bank.
There are plans for 3,500 housing units, an industrial park, two police stations and other infrastructure in a controversial area known as E1, between East Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, home to 31,000 settlers. Israeli measures in E1 were “one of the most significant challenges to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process”, the report says.
Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said conditions for Palestinians living in East Jerusalem were better than in the West Bank. “East Jerusalem residents are under Israeli law and they were offered full Israeli citizenship after that law was passed in 1967,” he said. “We are committed to the continued development of the city for the benefit of all its population.
Jenny Linnel a British ISM volunteer in Rafah said following escalated Israeli attacks in Rafah:
Shortly before midnight on the 6th of January, missiles began raining down on Rafah in one of the heaviest Israeli air strikes since the current atrocities began. Continuous sorties pounded the southern Gaza city for over 12 hours. Many homes were destroyed or severely damaged, especially in the neighbourhoods along the border with Egypt.
According to Fida Qishta, Rafah resident and ISM activist:
Papers dropped from planes in Rafah neighborhood ordered people to leave their homes in the areas stretching from the borderline all the way back to Sea Street, the main street running through the heart of Rafah, parallel to the border. This area is hundreds of metres deep and the site of thousands of homes. Most of these areas are refugee camps, where residents are being made refugees yet again, some for the third or fourth time following the mass home demolitions of 2003 and 2004 by Israeli military D-9 bulldozers.
People are told to leave their homes but even if they leave they are attacked. Nowhere is safe in the Gaza strip. Where will these families go? They are afraid to seek sanctuary in local UNRWA schools following yesterday’s massacres in Jabaliya. They are afraid to drive somewhere and be shot down on the road like the Sinwar family was. They are being temporarily absorbed by the rest of Rafah’s population – friends, neighbours, relatives.
Jenny added:
We have a friend in Yibna, directly on the border, who refuses to leave his home. We spoke to one woman in Al Barazil who has a family of 12 and simply doesn’t know where to go and another woman in Block J who is literally in the street tonight. Her father is in his nineties. The family home where ISM volunteers are staying is on the other side of the city centre and has become a refuge for three other families tonight. The house is filled with excited chatter and lots of children. Palestinians have a long-learned talent of making-do, but there is no escaping the deep sense of uncertainty…
Referring to hundreds of homes that were demolished in Rafah along the Egyptian border in 2002 former Israeli OC Southern Command, Yom Tov Samiah, contended in an interview to the “Voice of Israel” on the 16 January 2002 that, “These houses should have been demolished and evacuated a long time ago, because the Rafah border is not a natural border, it cannot be defended… Three hundred meters of the Strip along the two sides of the border must be evacuated… Three hundred meters, no matter how many houses, period.”
The six hundred meter buffer zone that the former OC Southern Command of the Israeli Occupation Forces referred to seven years ago seems to be Israel’s goal in the latest wave of demolitions.
ISM media coordinator Adam Taylor stated:
Israel wants a buffer zone in Rafah in order to besiege Gaza more effectively. The tunnels that ran under the border with Egypt have become Gaza’s life line during the prolonged Israeli siege and served as the only source for basic necessities such as fuel and medicine that Israel did not allow into the Gaza strip. This recent wide scale destruction of private property of the occupied people of Rafah is not a military necessity. One war crime is being committed in order to reinforce another – that of collective punishment.
