Israel Demolished 18,000 Palestinian Homes since 1967

by Mohammed Mar'i (Palestine)

The Israeli occupation authorities have demolished 18,000 Palestinian homes since the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967, said an Israeli human rights group on Sunday.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) said in a press release that the organization will begin on June 11th a campaign to rebuild each and every Palestinian home demolished by Israel – about 300 homes a year. ICHAD said it will dedicate our campaign to the memory of Hajja Rasmia.

ICHAD added that “The Campaign to Rebuild All Palestinian Homes Demolished Over the Next Year” is part of its contribution to the global campaign against the Occupation, in partnership with ICAHD-USA and ICAHD-UK, to rebuild each the Palestinian homes.

It notified that the funding coming mainly from Jewish donors appalled by the Israeli government’s house demolition policy and policies of transfer and dispossession.

ICHAD said that the very first act of the Israeli Occupation in 1967 was home demolitions. On June 11th, as the 1967 June War was drawing to its close, more than 135 Palestinian families in the historic Muslim Magharibeh Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City – the vast majority refugees from 1948 – were roused from their beds in the dead of night to watch in horror as Israeli bulldozers summarily destroyed their homes and the quarter’s two mosques, all in order to create an open plaza in front of the Al Buraq Wall (Western Wall).

According to ICHAD, it was an operation that had nothing to do with either the war or security, but to create the first of thousands of “facts on the ground” intended to make Israel’s control of the Occupied Territories permanent. In the wanton and illegal razing of the Magharibeh Quarter, Hajja Rasmia Tabaki, an elderly Palestinian woman, was killed when her home was demolished on top of her. She became the Occupation’s first victim.

This June 11th, ICAHD will return to this site where the Israeli Occupation began in order to announce its rebuilding campaign. Joining with the remnants of the Magharibeh Quarter’s Palestinian residents who remained scattered throughout the Old City to remember the tragic events of that night 40 years ago, an important gesture of Israelis taking responsibility for their government’s actions.

ICHAD said it will also sign a petition calling on the UN to implement Security Council Resolution 252, adopted in the wake of the quarter’s demolition (termed “urban improvement” by Israel’s UN Ambassador), which “Urgently calls upon Israel to rescind all such measures already taken and to desist forthwith from taking any further action which tends to change the status of Jerusalem.”

The participants will then walk from the Magharibeh Quarter to the site of demolished homes in the village of Silwan, where ICHAD will commence the building campaign, the homes that the group named batei sumud, “houses of steadfastness” against policies of transfer and dispossession