Rights and Accountability 5 January 2014
Bulldozers belonging to the Israeli interior ministry, accompanied by hundreds of police special forces, carried out the demolition of the home of Sadiq Abu Hallouq in the Ayn al-Shaara neighborhood on the pretext that it was built without a permit, SAFA news agency reported.
The demolition took place after the home’s residents were forced out of it.
Dozens of Umm al-Fahim residents came into the streets to protest the demolition, Wattan TV reports.
The video above, posted by YouTube user “aNas egbaria” and also on the website PLS48.net, is titled “Demolition of a house in Umm al-Fahim’s Ayn al-Shaara neighborhood.”
It shows two bulldozers demolishing a home in darkness, by the light of their headlamps.
PLS48.net also posted photos showing large numbers of Israeli police blocking off the area where the demolition took place.
Judaization
The demolition underscores that citizenship does not protect the 1.5 million Palestinians who are nominally citizens of Israel from the arbitrary and racially motivated state violence that routinely targets Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem.
Since its founding, Israel has severely restricted the areas on which Palestinian citizens of Israel are allowed to build and has – with the exception of forced resettlement towns for Bedouins – not allowed a single new town for Palestinian citizens of Israel.
As Patrick Strickland reported for The Electronic Intifada on Friday, this policy, aimed at breaking up Palestinian geographic contiguity and implanting Jewish-only settlements, “has translated into housing demolitions, land confiscation and restrictions on land purchasing and municipal expansion, among other measures.”
Arabs 48, which reports on Palestinians in present-day Israel, says that “the Umm al-Fahim and Wadi Ara regions have been tense in recent weeks because of the threat of demolition of dozens of homes on the pretext of ‘construction without permits.’”
In response, local residents set up a protest tent in the Ayn Ibrahim quarter of Umm al-Fahim last week “in solidarity with the Abdul Ghani family” whose four houses are under threat of Israeli demolition, Arabs 48 states.
Following this morning’s demolition, Palestinians in present-day Israel fear a renewed wave of destruction targeting their communities.
