Khalid Zir, a 39-year old laborer living in Silwan, was forced to move his family into a cave in late August 2013 after Israeli municipal bulldozers destroyed the small shack that had been home to his family for seven years. The cave that lies beneath the small hill where his home once stood, which was once used as a stable for the family’s farm animals, is now home to Khalid, his wife and five children, the youngest of which is just 4 months old.
This is the third time Khalid has had his house destroyed in Silwan and has few other options for his family. “I have nowhere else to go, I can’t rent because I’m not working right now,” he says. He went on to lament that the taxes that the people of Silwan pay to the Jerusalem municipality, “are going to the bulldozer that destroyed our house, the tear gas they shoot at us, and the settlers.” He continued, “Israelis are all the time talking about the peace, but they won’t let us live…you can imagine the kind of peace they have in mind.”
The desperation that led Khalid to move his family into a cave and their peculiarity of their living situation has attracted much media attention to what is usually considered an old story. The fact that another Palestinian home was destroyed in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem of around 55,000 inhabitants, is nothing new. According to B’Tselem, in the last ten years, 448 Arab-owned homes in East Jerusalem have been demolished, leaving 1,752 people homeless. So far, in 2013, 30 homes have been knocked down, leaving 80 homeless. In Silwan, 85% of the homes in the area, almost all of them built without official Israeli permits after 1967 due to the difficulty in securing them and their high costs, have demolition orders. The Palestinians here are losing their homes to encroaching Jewish settlements, land seizures by the Israeli national park, and excavations of the expanding “City of David” archeological site. Full story...
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This is the third time Khalid has had his house destroyed in Silwan and has few other options for his family. “I have nowhere else to go, I can’t rent because I’m not working right now,” he says. He went on to lament that the taxes that the people of Silwan pay to the Jerusalem municipality, “are going to the bulldozer that destroyed our house, the tear gas they shoot at us, and the settlers.” He continued, “Israelis are all the time talking about the peace, but they won’t let us live…you can imagine the kind of peace they have in mind.”
The desperation that led Khalid to move his family into a cave and their peculiarity of their living situation has attracted much media attention to what is usually considered an old story. The fact that another Palestinian home was destroyed in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem of around 55,000 inhabitants, is nothing new. According to B’Tselem, in the last ten years, 448 Arab-owned homes in East Jerusalem have been demolished, leaving 1,752 people homeless. So far, in 2013, 30 homes have been knocked down, leaving 80 homeless. In Silwan, 85% of the homes in the area, almost all of them built without official Israeli permits after 1967 due to the difficulty in securing them and their high costs, have demolition orders. The Palestinians here are losing their homes to encroaching Jewish settlements, land seizures by the Israeli national park, and excavations of the expanding “City of David” archeological site. Full story...
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