Beit Hanina

Badwan al-Salaymeh has been told he will have to pay the bill for the demolition of his own house.

The four-story building in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian neighborhood a few miles north of East Jerusalem, was clearly home to wealth. As our carload of internationals pulled up the small street leading to Abu Majed Eisha’s house at around midnight I noticed several BMWs parked along the way. From what I had learned during my brief time in the West Bank, Palestine, I knew already that this was not going to be an ordinary house demolition. Jill Shaw writes from Beit Hanina.

My Palestinian mother has a favorite expression that she likes to use. Whenever she wants the curtains pulled back, a window or door opened to the outside world, or just wants to get out of the house, to be outdoors, she would always say that she wants to ashoof wijih rabie (roughly translated: “to see the face of my God”). Last summer, while my family and I were in Palestine, we got to see and experience, first hand, the magnificence of God’s face and the ugly face of occupation and oppression, the Apartheid Wall that is being built by Israel. Mike Odetalla writes from Beit Hanina.

Adla Abdel Jaber As-Sayyefi, 37 years old, went into labour at around 3am on the morning of December 10th. Her husband rushed to his parent’s house concerned because Adla was due to go hospital to have an operation as it was going to be a breech birth, but she went into labour too early. Patricia Smith tells the story.

The current Israeli military incursion and complete re-occupation of the West Bank is about to enter its fifth week.

Last night two Palestinian boys were killed in an explosion in the Al-Ama’ari refugee camp in Ramallah. Eyewitnesses said that some children, who were playing football in the street, had found a pipe-like object lying on the ground.

For nearly a month, two million residents of the West Bank have been under almost constant curfew. This deliberate policy by the Israeli government has created a humanitarian disaster throughout the West Bank.

Yesterday and overnight the Israeli forces carried out actions that are indicative of their occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

The major towns and cities in the West Bank remain under curfew; isolated from each other by a series of barriers, dug up roads, check points and military patrols.

The Israeli group, Peace Now, released results on June 30th from their latest survey on settler activity. They found “that since the elections of February 2001 and up to the present time some 44 new settlement sites have been established in the West Bank.