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Al Aqaba To Be Turned Into A Ghetto
Latest News, Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, May 15th, 2007

The village of al Aqaba in the Jordan Valley and the Bedouin families connected with it are to be confined on less than 0.1 percent of their original lands. Six homes have been given demolition orders and the villagers have been handed out a plan that allows them to reside on not more than 20 dunums.

Above: One of the communities on the lands of Aqaba that will be displaced with the new Occupation plans.

The people of al Aqaba own and reside in an area of some 30 000 dunums of agricultural and grazing land. A small residential area is the focal point for many extended families living within the area. Hundreds of families will be displaced from their homes under the latest Occupation plans which forbid the people of Aqaba from residing outside the 20 dunums representing the center of Aqaba, To make the situation worse, even within the tiny 20 dunums, six homes have already received demolition orders.

The evident aim of the plan is to cleanse the land of Aqaba of its Palestinian population and to colonize and confiscate it in a second stage. Living conditions within the remaining 20 dunum will be impossible and the village will be drastically overpopulated. As a result the villagers and Bedouin will be forced to leave and join the over 6 million Palestinian refugees and displaced.

Al Aqaba is one of the small Palestinian villages overlooking the Jordan valley and its lands are one of the main areas for cattle in the West Bank. For more than 10 years the people of al Aqaba have been struggling for the right to exist on their land. Continuous house demolitions and the destruction of water reservoirs have been threatening their survival while a number of people from al Aqaba and Tayasir have been shot by the occupation forces during military training in the area. The villages of Hadidiya, Humza, al Farsiya, al Maleh, al Hamme, ad Deir, Jarsa, Ibziq, Jabari, are also within so called military areas in the Jordan valley and suffer nightmarish conditions similar to those in al Aqaba.

Above: The map handed over to the people of Aqaba by the Occupation shows the borders of the ghetto into which they are to be jammed.