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Another Bedouin family to be evicted as the round-up continues
Latest News, Palestinian grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, November 4th, 2007

Another Bedouin family is to be driven from their home as the Occupation continues its push to ethnically cleanse the areas around the Jerusalem-Jericho road to make way for settlement expansion.

Above: Ibrahim Dufula Abu Dahuq in front of his home in Arab Jahilin.

Ibrahim Dufula Abu Dahuk and around thirty others live to the north of Al Jeeb village, North West Jerusalem. They have been ordered by the Occupation court to leave the area within 14 days, as their house is to be demolished for the construction of the Apartheid Wall. Two nearby Bedouin communities of around sixty are awaiting judgement on the case for their expulsion, but it seems likely that they too will be removed.

The families settled in the area with their tents 26 years ago, after the Occupation bulldozers destroyed their houses in 1980 to build Kfar Adumin settlement in Al Khan al Ahmar area along the Jerusalem-Jericho road.

Quarter of a century later, the Occupation is pushing ahead with a new effort to remove Bedouins for a new wave of settlement expansion along the road and in order to complete the Apartheid Wall.

An estimated thirty thousand Bedouins, all from the extended Al Jahalin family, face expulsion. Fifty one families near Al Jib, Bir Nabala, Beit Iksa and Nabu Samuel, driven from Khan Al Ahmar in 1981 have been served with expulsion orders, and are likely to be forced to assimilate into the villages. Bedouins near Abu Dis, Elizariah and Sawahara area have been told that they are to be removed to an area in Abu Dis. Fifteen separate communities in Khan Al Ahmar, in the area between Anata Square, Al Khan Al Ahmar square and Jericho, are to be rounded up and herded into a single concentration near Nabi Musa.

Israeli planners in the Naqab have a policy of transferring Bedouins into concentrations, or ‘rekuzim’. This policy is now apparently being visited on the West Bank.

Precise details of the areas to which the Bedouins are being expelled have yet to emerge, but forcible transfer will destroy the communities’ traditional way of life, as they have insufficient water and grazing areas for their shepherding lifestyle.

The Al Jahalin family are originally from Tel Arad in Bir Saba. In the beginning of the 50s, militant Zionist groups forced them from their land. A number became refugees in Jordan while others were scattered across the West Bank.

Above: The path of the Wall in al Jeeb goes in the middle of Ibrahim's tents.

Above: The Occupation's bulldozers are working to finish the Wall north of al Jeeb.

Above: The Wall north east of al Jeeb is still under construction and will allow further expansion of Pisgat Ze'ev settlement.