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Photo:
Demolition order. Published by IMEMC News
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by IMEMC News
Feb 21, 2022

On Sunday, an Israeli Court approved the demolition of the family home of the imprisoned Palestinian Mohammad Youssef Jaradat.

This action comes just one week after the demolition of the home of another member of the Jaradat family: Mahmoud Ghaleb Jaradat.

Jaradat is from the town of Al-Silah Al-Harithiya, west of Jenin, in the northern part of the West Bank. He stands accused of killing an Israeli colonial settler near the evacuated settlement of Homesh. In that incident, Israeli paramilitary settler Yehuda Dimentman was killed in a shooting in the northern West Bank on December 16, 2021. Israeli forces have accused Mohammad Jaradat and Mahmoud Jaradat of the crime, and both are currently in custody in an Israeli prison awaiting trial.

In an act of collective punishment, which is illegal under international law, Israeli forces issued an order for the demolition of Jaradat’s family home.

The family submitted a petition to the court through the human rights organization “HaMoked” since the notification was delivered, but on Sunday the court rejected that petition, and gave the family until next Thursday to leave their home so that Israeli forces can demolish it.

The daughter of Mahmoud Jaradat, whose home was demolished last Sunday, made this statement to reporters after her home was destroyed:

"We will never kneel"

When protests erupted during the demolition of Mahmoud Jaradat’s home last Sunday, Israeli forces invaded the town and shot and killed a 17-year old boy, Mohammad Abu Salah.

According to the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, ICAHD, “The demolition policy is part of Israel’s attempt to Judaize Palestine, to transform an Arab country into a Jewish one. During and after the Nakba of 1948, when the state of Israel was established, it systematically demolished about 52,000 Palestinian homes, more than 530 entire villages, towns and urban neighborhoods. Since the beginning of the Occupation in 1967, Israel has demolished another 55,000 homes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Thousands more continue to be demolished inside Israel itself.

“Israel’s policy of house demolitions represents the essence of the “conflict”: one people displacing another; ICAHD’s campaign of resistance has proven a powerful and effective vehicle for holding Israel accountable. ICAHD uses the demolition policy to “reframe” the conflict. The issue is not security, as Israel would have us think, because the demolition of Palestinian homes has nothing to do with security, but is rather one of ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism and Judaization.

“We are now witnessing the climax of that Judaizing policy, one of the largest campaigns of demolitions since we started our work in 1997. Hundreds of homes are being demolished throughout the OPT as well as within the Green Line, where it is attacking its own (Arab) citizens. Entire Bedouin communities in the Negev are being to make way for Jewish settlements, while thousands of homes of Palestinian citizens in the Galilee are threatened.”