On August 13 between 9 and 10 am, the demolition of the Bedouin village of al-Hadidiya in the Jordan Valley began. Two homes, belonging to Abdullah Hafez Yusuf Bani Odeh and Abdullah Hussein Bisharat, were destroyed along with nearby animal enclosures.
However, the villagers remain defiant in the face of this latest onslaught by the Occupation, and are refusing to leave their land and property.
The Occupation forces gave the families five minutes to take their property from their homes before starting the demolition. Five days earlier, Occupation forces went on a spree of demolitions in the Jordan Valley, destroying four homes and two water tanks in Bardala, Sahel Libqeya, Frush Beit Dajan and Jiftlik.
In al-Hadidiya and neighbouring Humsa, seventeen Bedouin families, numbering around 180 people face eviction by force. The expulsion of the villagers of al Hadidiya and Humsa will add to the six million Palestinian refugees already driven from their lands.
The Occupation have stepped up the pressure on the villagers since the start of 2007, yet, Israel policies aimed at the annexation of the Jordan Valley and the expulsion of its Palestinian population commenced immediately after the start of the Occupation of the West Bank in 1967. Parts of the Libqaâa plains, where al-Hadidiya and Humsa are located, were declared military closed zones or military training areas, others were swallowed by settlement construction.
The Jordan Valley is strategically of enormous importance. Israeli control of the area allows the Occupation to keep the Palestinian people in the West Bank encircled, without access to borders. It confiscates core water reserves of the Jordan river and 28% of the West Bank land. The colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley undermines effectively any possibility of a two state solution.
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