Palestinian Children Face Forced Expulsion From Their Homes

الجديد في أخبار مصر والنمسا وخزة ضمير وهمسة عتاب موجهة للفلسطينيين
السوريون عاتبون على إخوانهم الفلسطينيين إسرائيلية تعمل في إحدى سفارات فلسطين

kids_on_donkeys_600_pxChristian Peacemaker Teams Palestine – Over 1000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, face imminent forced expulsion from their homes in Masafer Yatta, which lies within Israeli Firing Zone 918.

The residents of Masafer Yatta urgently need your help to prevent the forced removal of their villages. Their legal status is precarious, and their homes and schools could be demolished at any time.  Such an action by the Israeli military would constitute the largest forced expulsion of Palestinian civilians in many years. Imagine  that your neighborhood was declared a firing range.  You would be threatened with forced evacuation.  Demolition orders would be issued for your home, your church, and the school your children attend.  Your land would cease to belong to you, and your livestock would be removed.

This is what families living in eight villages in the southern West Bank region known as Masafer Yatta face.

Twelve villages lie within the area Israel claims as Firing Zone 918.  Residents of four of the villages have been told they are excluded from the attempted eviction only because the ammunition used by soldiers training for war near their homes is not  live.  The 1000 residents of the other eight villages, half of whom are children, could lose their homes, their schools, their crops and livestock, their mosques and their way of life within the year.

These Palestinian families were forcibly removed by the Israeli military in 1999 and many of their homes, wells and animal shelters were destroyed. Some of the region’s residents returned in 2000 after a successful court battle.  Since then they have lived under constant threat of home demolition, settler violence and military harassment.
On January 16 of this year the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) filed a petition on behalf of residents and the Israeli court granted a temporary order preventing forcible transferring of the families pending a further decision.

The temporary order is all that is currently preventing the forced removal of the families living in Masafer Yatta.

In the past month soldiers have repeatedly driven large vehicles across planted fields, confiscated cars, cameras,  phones and livestock belonging to residents, landed helicopters next to dwellings and livestock, and threatened families with imminent eviction and destruction of their homes. Children find unexploded ordnance in the fields where their sheep graze.

On February 28 14 Palestinians, including four children aged four to nine, were stopped and detained by Israeli soldiers overnight for 8 hours. The group was traveling to see family members who are residents of Jinba, the largest of the 8 villages under threat.  Soldiers confiscated four vehicles and the cell phones of family members who came to find their relatives.  The group was unable to contact anyone until police arrived the following morning.
On February 18 Soldiers confiscated two newborn goats and a donkey from Kamel Mahamra, a shepherd from the village of Maghayir al-Abeed, who was grazing his animals near the village of Al-Majaz, inside firing range 918.  The soldiers loaded the kids into a Hummer and took the shepherd’s donkey, which was harnessed to a wheeled water container. (See article published in Haaretz by Amira Haas)

7 comments to Palestinian Children Face Forced Expulsion From Their Homes

  • ramapithecus

    What’s there to comment about here? Anyone with a shred of common human decency can see that this article details an inhumane obscenity of the worst kind.

    Who is speaking truth when the government of a nation-state supposedly forged over the right for people to live in peace without threat of terrorism, visits that same terrorism upon others? The only people who can ever describe this kind of activity as “just and right” are clearly dysfunctional emotionally and mentally. They need to be seen as mindless sycophants to horrific Terrorism, as deranged as the people who spearhead this type of abomination on other human beings.

    We need to find the Wellspring of Love and Peace that lives on even in the corner of the heart of the worst among us. We must transform this sickness, before the human race and quite possibly the world is torn asunder. May Peace Prevail. Thanks.

  • caroline

    Bastards! All we can do is try to
    \spread the word how evil the Israelis are. Support Iran, support anyone who is not supported in the MSM (zionist controlled propoganda). Do like they do…act to be there friend and betray them and enjoy it. Wait for the opportunity to play victorious when screwing them over. All zionist jews should be eliminated.

  • chick

    Israel thinks it can do what its evil heart likes and there will be no blowback.
    It may seem that way to a deluded degenerate heart who cannot even feel the hatred that its policies towards Palestinians generate towards it and has generated towards it, but it will feel that blowback when it becomes physical and the longer and harsher their ill treatment of Palestinians becomes the greater will the eventual blowback become. This is central to the Apocalypse of John in the New Testament. This is the story of Palestine that will one day be written.

  • doug girard

    this is what happens when one group of people believe they are “chosen” or “exceptional.” that delusion has been with us for a long time and a broken and decaying planet is the outcome. “I take what I want because I deserve to have it,” the motto which should appear on all Israeli/US money.

  • Tom

    Greetings Kawther Salam,
    I came across your website on the internet and for some reason I felt compelled to write you and share some of my thoughts and opinions on the troubles of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

    I am not a scholar on middle east studies and I certainly would never presume to have more knowledge than someone like yourself who is not only educated on this subject but has also lived the experience of being a Palestinian and living in Palestine. Therefore please consider my comments with the understanding that I am pretty ignorant about this issue. I won’t go into the history of the region since as a high school history teacher I know that history is the study of facts, so what’s the point of arguing facts?

    What I really want to talk about is the future of the State of Israel. It would seem to me that religion is the source of the problem. I know this is an overly simplistic view of the situation but I just have never been able to shake this idea I have of Israel becoming this grand universal center for religion and peace. After all, the world’s three major religions converge on this same small spot of land, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This sets up an obvious choice of only two options: war or peace. Currently only the war option has been chosen. As long as the two sides see each other as different and needing to be kept separate there will be war. A free Palestinian State will not end the conflict it merely props up one side to make for a more equal fight and thereby prolonging the conflict. The only path I can see is to remove religion from the government of Israel.

    Remove the walls from around the Palestinian enclosures and make them full citizens of Israel/Palestine. I understand the need of the Jewish people to finally have a homeland following the horror of WWII. What I fail to understand is their desire to so by instituting a religious regime that oppresses its minority population who are discriminated against solely on their beliefs.

    The unfortunate thing about this idea of transforming Israel into a peace center for the world’s religions, a sort of Universal Vatican, is that it will probably only come about after some horrible conflict that takes the lives of millions. Only then, it seems, are the world’s leaders able to see the childishness of their actions and seek a more spiritually evolved path. The culmination of this vision of mine is to see the construction of a new temple in Israel. One that embraces ALL religions and is the greatest monument to peace humanity has ever created.

    A man can dream…

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