The demolition forces enter the village. All the children run to their mothers, who scramble to salvage whatever they can from their homes before it’s too late. Everyone watches on anxiously to see who will be made homeless today. The bulldozers gather in the center of the village and then stop. Soldiers disembark. The villagers look each other in the eye, searching for words of comfort, but there are none. Our children ask us why this is happening, but we have no answers.
This was the scene on June 26 in my village of Umm al-Khair in the occupied West Bank, when Israeli forces demolished 11 homes, leaving families without shelter in the heat of summer. The demolitions were just the beginning of what became one of the most violent weeks in the history of our small agricultural community: we have since faced a sharp escalation in settler violence, with subsequent attacks seeing settlers shoot live ammunition in the village and destroy our water system during a severe heat wave…..more
