Region | Palestinian Territories
Israeli forces dismantle Bedouin camps, displace several families
Area home to herders for years but army says it is military zone.
- Reuters
- Published: 23:05 June 19, 2009
Wadi Al Maleh, West Bank: Exercising its authority as an occupying power, the Israeli army has begun breaking up Bedouin camps in the West Bank where the nomadic herders have grazed their livestock for years.
Two dozen families have been displaced so far in eviction operations this month against low, black tents dotting the parched hillsides of the northern Jordan Valley.
Palestinian officials say some 200 families are threatened. Israeli authorities, enforcing what the Human Rights Watch group calls a "heartless policy", say the Bedouin are being moved for their own protection from areas in military fire zones.
Their dwellings may only be tents, but to Bedouin living by a spring they call "sweet water" they were home, until they were scooped up and dumped in a broken heap by the shovel of an army mechanical digger.
Animal pens were flattened and scant bits of bedding and ramshackle furniture were piled in the open.
"We have been living on this land for seven years," said Mohammad Ka'abneh, a 38-year-old father of nine. "The soldiers told us to move because this is a military zone. But we've nowhere else to go. And then they came back this morning."
The eviction is a strange exercise: there are no houses for the army to demolish as it would in other cases deemed illegal construction, so the herders can just re-pitch their tents.
A spokesman for Israel's military-run Civil Administration in the West Bank said it has been trying for some time to persuade the Bedouin to move to safer locations.
"When this failed, we warned them that they were endangering their lives by setting up tents in the middle of a military zone and that they faced evacuation," the spokesman said.
Last month, the army erected signs on Bedouin dirt roads here with the warning: "Danger. Firing Area. Entrance Forbidden."
Eviction notices were issued, with no right of appeal, and families were told to move within 24 hours. Three weeks later soldiers arrived without further warning and broke up the camps.
Some of the herders say they have lived on the land since the 1950s, and are so far refusing to quit the area.
The dangers are real. "I lost my son," said Qadri Daraghmeh. The 19-year-old was killed by a blast in January 2008, he said, and army investigators said it was a mine left behind after an exercise. "But there is nowhere else to go," the farmer said.
A few hours after the soldiers left, Ka'abneh's family had moved just a couple of hundred metres away, rigging up an open-walled tent for shade against the hammering heat. Their goats took shelter under a big palm, using every inch of shadow.
"We'll just rebuild, like our neighbours over there did immediately," he said, pointing to a family tent he said.
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