This morning, Israeli apartheid forces and their settler militias attacked the Al-Mu’arrajat area. They arrested Suleiman Malihat only to then move on to attack and brutalize the children and teachers in the Arab Al-Ka’abnah Elementary School in Al-Mu’arrajat, northwest of Jericho,
Armed with iron bars and sticks, the settlers entered the school grounds and assaulted pupils and teachers. In the meanwhile, the Israeli soldiers handcuffed the school principal and teachers. According to the Red Crescent, seven Palestinians have been transferred to the hospital, with medical teams continuing to monitor the situation around the school.
Built in 1968, the school of Arab Al-Ka’abnah currently serves the education needs of hundreds of students from the Bedouin community of Arab Al-Ka’abnah. Since Israel intensified its apartheid and ethnic cleansing practices of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley in the 1990s, the school has received 20 demolition orders from the Israeli occupation authorities.
Just as the denial of the right to education has always been a central part in Israeli policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, the school of Al-Ka’abnah has since long become a symbol of the community’s steadfastness. It is a place that demonstrates the determination of the Al Ka’abnah community not to abandon the land but to build for the future and the next generation. The Jordan Valley Solidarity Campaign and the Popular Council for the Protection of the Jordan Valley have over the years provided the school with a solar system and added two new classrooms in order to accommodate the growing number of pupils. They have also organized collective efforts to renovate the school and its playgrounds.
The Ka’abnah tribe are 2000 people living west of Jericho along the road to Ramallah. It is one of 46 Bedouin communities under threat of renewed displacement. The tribe traces their origins to areas southeast of Hebron, from which they have been expelled as part of the Nakba, Israel’s large-scale ethnic cleansing between 1947-51. Today, the Ka’abnah tribe faces ongoing and dramatically increasing harassment from the Israeli military and settlers. They are being systematically deprived of access to water and electricity, even though the main electric wires that provide energy to the illegal settlements pass through their community and two big water reservoirs that guarantee water for the settlements are built on their land, only ten meters from the school.
The attacks on Palestinian communities, which Israel has been targeting for decades in order to force them to flee, are dramatically increasing in frequency and brutality. The settler militias, which have been trained, armed, and strengthened over the last years, are working now closely with the military to implement Israel’s ethnic cleansing plans across the West Bank. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Palestinian families to be able to endure the continuous aggression, placing significant pressure on Palestinian families to leave their homes and face forced displacement from their lands. All of this, including the precise list of villages to be annihilated, are public, denounced to the United Nations, and well known to states across the globe.
The July 2024 ruling of the International Court of Justice on the illegality of Israel’s presence and its military occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has underscored that all states are under the obligation to take action to stop Israel’s violation of the Palestinian right to self-determination and of international law and to ensure accountability.
Only immediate and effective sanctions on apartheid Israel can ensure that Palestinian children can study without being harmed, communities can stay on their land, Israel’s occupation and settler-colonial apartheid regime ends, and the horrendous genocide against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, where schools are either bombed or transformed into refugee camps, is stopped.
