Ibrahim Awad from Tuba
By Ali Awad
My name is Ibrahim Awad and I was born in Tuba in 1942. I inherited our home and our land in Tuba from my great grandfather.
In 1999, the Israeli military evicted 12 villages in Masafer Yatta, including Tuba. I was evicted along with my extended family: nine sons and six daughters, five grandchildren – the youngest of which was born during the eviction. The wife of one of my sons was pregnant with my sixth grandchild. Hundreds of our sheep were also evicted along with my family, thrown homeless out of our land.
So we started to look for a home. At the beginning, we borrowed a cave for us all to stay in; however, the cave’s owners told us we could only stay for a month or two, as they would need it by the time winter arrived. So we decided to move and settle on our agricultural lands, three kilometers away from Tuba. We brought some tents with us, including a traditional tent that I inherited from my mother, made from the hair of the goats. We managed to build a shelter for my whole family in one tent, while the sheep were in another. We lived this way every day, only hoping to return to our home in Tuba.
After the evictions, residents from other villages in Masafer Yatta, like Jinba, Al Fakhit, Tabban, Majaz, and others, arranged to meet. We decided to take legal action together, so we could return to our homes.
While I was still lucky enough to have lands to live on in a temporary camp, other residents did not have anywhere else to go. They decided to return to their village while we were preparing the legal case. The Israeli Civil Administration, once again, loaded the residents, their properties, and their belongings up in trucks and drove them away, out of Masafer Yatta.
We also faced trouble from the Israeli Civil Administration. Late in the evening one day, they arrived at our camp, along with a bus full of soldiers, and confiscated our sheep’s tent, our water tanks, and even our food. We were left with not even one piece of bread. My wife remembers that they even took the eggs that I set aside in a jar for the children’s breakfast the next day.
When their trucks left, with all of our belongings, I was left alone to manage my family and our herd in the hills. The March night opened up with a very heavy rain, and we had nothing left to shelter us from the elements.
I spent the whole first night trying to control our sheep and collecting small dry wood from the hills to make a fire, so that my children and grandchildren could stay warm. In the morning, my son’s wife went into labor. We were lucky that a person with a car from the nearby city of Yatta rushed her and my wife to the hospital.
This time of year was the season that the sheep – my family’s only livelihood – also give birth. But on the first night, thirty sheep froze to death, including 12 sheep that had just given birth that same night. In the morning, I found all of their baby lambs dead.
The next day, some people donated two tents to us. We moved, again, to another place in a nearby valley and built one tent for us and one tent for the sheep.
Over the next few months, the residents of Masafer Yatta worked together with the lawyers on a legal case for our homes. On the day of the verdict, we arrived at the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem to find that international diplomats, Arab and Jewish Knesset members, and human rights organizations were there to support our case.
A decision was reached. After months of homelessness in the harsh winter cold, after losing some of our sheep and many of our possessions, after suffering from hunger, we forgot it all once we got an interim order to allow us to go back to our homes. Suddenly, the courtroom turned into a party hall.
I headed immediately to my family to give them the good news of our return home. We spent the evening celebrating, and we ate our dinner with happiness. The next morning, we dismantled our camp and headed back to Tuba.
However, even though we were allowed to return, we are living under the threat of expulsion. For two decades now, we have not been allowed to build new structures or even fix existing ones. After more than 20 years of waiting for the Israeli Supreme Court's final ruling, we submitted all the documents to approve that this is our land.
Horribly, the highest court of the occupying state didn't take any of that into consideration. Eventually on May 4th 2022, following a session that we attended in the supreme court on March 15th, the judges ruled again in favor of the military, giving the Israeli army the green light to train with live ammunition inside these villages, and to decide the fate of thousands of people from eight villages in Masafer Yatta. Now the army can decide either to train above the people's heads, or to evict them from their houses to make a room for the firing training.
Even though we were allowed to return 22 years ago, we have lived under the threat of expulsion ever since that day. The court’s decision in 2000 was only temporary, and now the village of Tuba and the other villages in the firing zone are more at risk than ever.
Meanwhile, an Israeli settlement and outpost, built just a few hundred meters from our homes, have taken over all of our pasture land. This takeover is part of a settlement chain that has managed to separate Masafer Yatta from the city of Yatta, and has almost completely isolated our village.
Before the occupation, our lives were simple. We were dependent on our agriculture and livestock, and we ate each plant in its season. Now we wait, under the threat of military expulsion and settler aggression, for the final ruling. All we hope for is to live, as our family, at home in Tuba.