Waking up early in the morning, one's only thought is to go about their day's work. Here in Masafer Yatta, in the period before the Israeli occupation, people used to wake up with nothing in their minds but to spend the day with their families herding their flocks and working in their fields. Today however, the biggest thought people have when waking up is — will they lose their house today? No one here knows what day they will wake up and the bulldozers accompanied by the Israeli occupation forces will be at their door. No one knows when the soldiers will arrive to take their children out into the open air and turn their house into a pile of rubble. This is what Safa Al-Najjar and her family have been going through.
Safa is an old woman in her late sixties from the village of al-Mirkiz in Masafer Yatta Occupied West Bank. She was born into a beautiful life that relied on farming and the husbandry of sheep and goats, until Israel took over the West Bank in 1967. Since then she has been forced to live the expulsion policies as a routine part of her daily life.
Since December 2021, the Israeli army has demolished all the shelters that she built for herself and her grandchildren. “I have been living here all my life, using the cave as the only shelter for my family. However, with the growth of my family, we decided to build a simple house of two rooms and a bathroom for the family and a barn for our sheep.”
Shortly after Safa and her family finished working on their home, the Israeli civil administration gave it a demolition order. And on December 2, 2021, the occupation forces demolished all of her work, leaving her just with her cave, her sheep, and no roof.
“Immediately, we started to clean the rubble and rebuild. In addition to being very tired from the hard work of rebuilding a home, I had an intense pressure in my chest. I don't know if it was because my house was demolished, or because I knew it will be demolished again soon. But we want a house, so we must rebuild it”
And this is exactly what happened — it didn’t even take six months for the Israeli occupation forces to come and wipe everything again. On May 11, 2022, they came to demolish the two rooms and bathroom that we had rebuilt.
Safa’s struggle, along with the thousands of others living in Masafer Yatta, is not new. This is a colonial policy that started at the beginning of the 1980s, when Israel declared 12 Palestinian villages including al-Mirkiz so called, "Firing Zone 918.” In order to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian villages and replace them with the Israeli settlements, Israel declared Masafer Yatta a region for Israeli military and weapon training. A few years after the declaration, in the year 1999, the Israeli army destroyed the villages and transported hundreds of the residents in military trucks out of the area. Safa, alongside hundreds of others, managed to return to their homes, but she still lives with these arbitrary policies.
A few days before the last time the Israeli civil administration demolished her home, on May 4, 2022, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that her home belonged to the army, as part of Firing Zone 918. Today she continues to rebuild, and the Israeli forces continue to respond with endless demolition orders. And Safa continues to live under the daily fear and threat of expulsion.