Israeli Demolition of Palestinian Woman's Home "A Double Crime"

posted on: Feb 12, 2015

A massive Israeli police force raided the Palestinian neighborhood of Bayarat Shannir in Lydd, a city in present-day Israel, on Tuesday morning.

Armed to the teeth and accompanied by bulldozers, hundreds of police officers stormed the neighborhood and sealed all entrances. At 10am, the police demolished the home of Hana al-Naqib, a mother of four, saying that it was built without a permit.

Hana and her children, aged 7, 8, 14 and 15, were violently expelled from their newly-built home, as were the neighbors who came to support them.

Daoud, Hana’s eldest son, is used to being awakened by his mother every day at 7am for school. On Tuesday, however, it was police with rifles pointed at his face who pulled him out of his bedroom. Instead of going to school, Daoud and his siblings were thrown outside into the cold with their mother.

This comes less than two weeks after the partial demolition of another Palestinian family’s home in Lydd. Israeli bulldozers destroyed parts of Ahmad Dabbour’s home on 1 February, but the demolition was suspended after the family’s lawyer pointed out a legal flaw in the demolition order.

Some fifteen kilometers southeast of Tel Aviv, the historic Palestinian town of Lydd was the site of one of the worst episodes in the Nakba, Israel’s 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In July of that year, some 50,000 Palestinians were driven out by Zionist militias and expelled to the West Bank. Many died from exhaustion and dehydration on the way.

Source: electronicintifada.net