Bedouin Child Starts School, but Loses Home

The swath of West Bank destruction by the Civil Administration continues, with 10 homes of Bedouin families demolished this week. That’s how the school year started for one first-grader.

Ha’aretz

The force swept into the Bedouin camp, did its demolition job and was gone within two hours. Crushed tin siding, scattered on the hillside and in the valley below, sways in the wind, its creaking sounds cutting through the deathly silence. Toddlers skitter about barefoot among the ruins, poking at them in the vain hope of unearthing some lost treasure. Their fathers are trying to come to terms what happened, and tell their tale to a handful of Palestinian reporters and cameramen who have arrived at the disaster zone.

A jeep bearing the symbol of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is also here, to enumerate and report. So too is a B’Tselem human-rights organization field researcher, Amer Aruri.

Until two years ago, a community of some 500 Bedouin shepherds lived peacefully here, in the al-Hadirath encampment, between the settlement of Adam and the Palestinian village of Jeba, outside Ramallah. Seventeen residents lost their ramshackle dwellings on Monday morning, along with nearly all their property. Among them are some 10 children who just started the school year and now have no home.

With their long experience in destruction, the Civil Administration personnel did their usual efficient job. They showed up at around 9 A.M. – four jeeps, one big tractor and one small one, and a van, backed up by armed troops – and were gone by 11. In that time, 15 tin shacks belonging to Bedouin families, including five pens for livestock, were crushed, run over, ripped apart and uprooted. Now their remains are scattered in the wind, heaps of metal and small boards next to what were people’s homes, like monuments to what once existed here.

We are at the ground zero of squalor: The huts contained next to nothing – certainly not electricity or water (that goes without saying) – except children with runny noses and tattered clothes. Now they no longer even have a shack to call home. The items the Bedouin were allowed to remove amount to barely nothing: a few piles of woolen blankets, a baby’s crib that stands upside down, and little else.

The Sha’ar Binyamin industrial zone and a Rami Levy supermarket are visible in the valley below.