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On November 3rd, the day of the U.S. presidential elections, Israel destroyed the shepherding village of Khirbet Humsa, in the northeastern West Bank. The organization @btselem subsequently reported that:
“74 people, including 41 children, were left homeless in the rain and wind. The demolition continued until 4pm. The forces demolished 18 tents and living barracks...
...29 tents and barracks that housed sheep, three barracks that served as storage, nine tents that served as kitchens, 10 mobile washrooms, two solar panels, 23 water tanks, 10 sheep pens...
...and sheep troughs and mangers. In addition, the forces destroyed over 30 tons of feed and water for the sheep, and confiscated vehicles and two tractors owned by three of the village's residents.” ( https://bit.ly/2IuZFFG )
This event was the most extensive and brutal demolition that Israel has carried out in the West Bank in years. So today, let’s talk about Khirbet Humsa.
Khirbet Humsa is a shepherding village whose residents originally come from the Palestinian village of Tamun, which is located about 10 kilometers northwest. The lands ofTamun cover over 94,000 dunam, and reach as far as the Jordan Valley.
In the West Bank, there are dozens of such shepherding communities, most of which are found in the open areas east of the Palestinians villages located on the mountain ridge.
In August 1967, a few months after Israel occupied the West Bank, it declared hundreds of thousands of dunam of land located east of the Palestinian villages on the mountain ridge to be “firing zones,” and banned Palestinians from entering them.
It is clear that at this stage, the army’s training regimen wasn't in the West Bank at all--it is therefore impossible that at this point in time, the closure of these areas could have had any connection to the army’s “training needs.” Why, then, did they close off these lands?
Because Israel wanted to prevent, or at least reduce, the access of Palestinians to large areas of the West Bank, and especially to the Jordan Valley bordering the Kingdom of Jordan, from which Israel had taken over the West Bank just a few months earlier.
The hundreds of thousands of dunams of land that were declared “firing zones”, were agricultural and grazing areas for dozens of villages, and for the Palestinian shepherding communities that belonged to them, including Khirbet Humsa.
This is how the residents of these villages and shepherding communities became illegal tenants in their own villages overnight.
But this was not enough for Israel. In the 1970s, Israel established two settlements in the area where Khirbet Humsa and a number of other shepherding communities who originated in Tamun were located:
the Beka’ot settlement, in 1972, and the Ro’i settlement, in 1976. In order to establish these two settlements, Israel plundered about 5,000 dunam of land from the area’s residents under the pretense of security measures, 4,200 dunam of which are owned by Palestinian residents.
Aerial photos taken between 1980 and 2002 show that the residents of Khirbet Humsa didn’t leave the area, even when it was declared a firing zone.
They continued to live there until the first years of the Second Intifada, when they were forced to leave due to Israel’s aggressive policy of closures in the Jordan Valley and segregating it from the rest of the West Bank, resulting in their access roads being blocked.
Eight or nine years passed, and the shepherding community from that area began to gradually recover, along with the easing of the closure on the Jordan Valley, which was finally officially lifted at the end of 2012.
But it didn’t suit the army or the Civil Administration that the residents of Khirbet Humsa returned, after almost a decade of absence, to live once again in the place where they had lived for generations, before Israel took over the area.
And so, the Civil Administration began issuing demolition orders against the tents and makeshift residential structures of the residents of Khirbet Humsa.
After all, as we know, all that open space in the West Bank, and in the Jordan Valley in particular, is reserved for Israelis alone.
Last week marked yet another chapter in the war of expropriation and expulsion that Israel is waging against the Palestinian civilian population in the West Bank.
