Yesterday in al Walajeh, west of Bethlehem, the Occupation forces demolished Mundir Abdel Khader Hamad’s home for the second time in one year.
***image2***Early in the morning, a large number of Occupation forces arrived with bulldozers. They besieged the area around the house. The family refused to leave their home but the army evicted them using military force in order to start the home demolition. The five members of Mundir Hamad’s family watched for the second time in one year as their home and all their efforts to build it turned to rubble by the Occupation bulldozers. Now they are homeless once again.
At the beginning of this year, the Hamad family found itself without a home or money. So the people in their community worked together to collect money, first for a shelter and then to rebuild the house.
The story of Mundir Hamad and his family will soon be repeated for the forty other families in Ein Jozeh. The Occupation plans to demolish all the houses, completely annihilating the community. After the war in 1967, the Occupation considered the area as part of the annexed Jerusalem municipality and now they are carrying out plans to make the land part of “Jewish Jerusalem”.
The community shares the same fate as other unrecognized villages: though part of Jerusalem, they have no services from the Occupation’s Jerusalem government and the PNA is not allowed to provide them with services either. The Occupation comes and invades the village in the days and the nights; arrests are frequent. All of this is meant to render life in Ein Jozeh unbearable and to force displacement upon the people.