“New documented videos of children being thrown out of their houses’ windows in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood by Israeli settlers alongside the Israeli Military”, Yousef Hammad added during a tour of Sheikh Jarrah with Eyewitness Palestine.
Sheikh Jarrah is a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, located on the slopes of "Mount Scopus", Jabl al-Masharif in Arabic and is home to about 3,000 residents. Since 1956, Sheikh Jarrah became home to twenty-eight families displaced from their original homes in the coastal cities of Yafa and Haifa. Exiled from Haifa in 1948 and after living in several areas as a result of ethnic cleansing, Yousef’s grandfather heard of the Sheikh Jarrah housing plan in 1956.
Hammad’s family, like twenty-seven other families, was given a house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood based on a contract between refugees, the Jordanian Government and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
“For three generations we lived in this neighborhood. My childhood memories were all built in that neighborhood.” Yousef added.
After the 1967 Israeli annexation of Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrahs' neighborhood was placed under the control of the Israeli occupation. Israeli Jewish Settlers started squatting in Palestinians homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood soon after the second Intifada in 2002. From 2009 to 2011 the scale of forcibly kicking local families out of their homes skyrocketed. A colonial-settler operation to judaize Jerusalem by altering its demography with a Jewish majority population.
Shiekh Jarrah plays a critical role for Israel in its Demographic altering; Israel considers Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood a demographic threat to Israel’s goal in the Judaization of Jerusalem. It is critical to mention here that the locals of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood are not new to forcible exile, as this marks the 3rd time for some since 1948.
Hammad’s wife is a Palestinian from Ramallah (twenty-minutes drive from Sheikh Jarrah). She holds a Palestinian ID (Green ID) unlike her husband Yousef who, like the majority of Palestinians in Jerusalem and '48, holds an Israeli ID (Blue ID). Having two different types of IDs, and in light of Israel’s apartheid laws applied on Palestinians, Hammad, his wife, and his children were confronted with a situation of family disunification. They either live separately where the mother lives in the West Bank and and the father (Yousef), along with their children, will reside in Jerusalem, which deprives the children from their mother and vice versa. Or, they live separately, where the children and their mom reside in the West Bank, and Yousef stays in Jerusalem, which will deprive the kids from their Blue ID, which would deprive the kids from their father, the rest of their father's family in Jerusalem, and having access to Jerusalem itself. Or, they all live together in the West Bank, which jeopardizes Yousef's Blue ID and thus is not a genuine option.
This imposed and difficult situation prevents the family from visiting each other and intensifies the restrictions on the whole family's freedom of movement . “There was no possible way to live under one roof, every day, like a normal-average family. Our daily routine became filled with waiting at checkpoints, applications from the occupations government, and lawyers, to overcome the disunification imposed on us as a family."
Today, Groups of settlers move in under the protection of police and hurl abuse and stones at the families' homes in the neighborhood, demanding them to leave and telling them “The houses and lands belong to Jews only”. This phenomenon is one of the daily hardships Palestinians face and it gets harder day by day. Like Hamad’s family, twenty-seven other families look injustice in the eye on daily basis as settlers like Yaakov Fauci, a Long Island, NY man that is paid by the Israeli government to squat in Al-Kurd's family's’ house and his justification was the infamous video and quote “If I don't steal it, someone else will”.
To learn more about Sheikh Jarrah and ask Yousef questions yourself, join Eyewitness Palestine and Yousef Hammad on Wednesday, September 25th at 12PM EST for a virtual delegation followed by a Q & A.
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