Forced evacuations plague Jordan Valley farmers

Yasser Abu Kbash a 43-year-old shepherd from Homsa Al Fuqa in northern Jordan Valley loaded his wife, seven children and some mattresses on his tractor and spent the cold winter night in a nearby parking lot.

He does this several times a month — whenever the Israeli military conducts drills in his area.

Abu Kbash quietly herds sheep for a living, but his simple farm life is constantly disrupted.

“It used to be twice a month but lately it’s been weekly,” he says.

Abu Kbash lives in a community with five other families in plastic houses and tents — they have limited electricity and get most of their energy from solar panels.

They are refugees, originally from Samoua, an area just south of Hebron, where Israeli colonists now live.

“I don’t understand the threat we pose to the Israelis. Why they are forcing us out of our homes?” he said.

“They can conduct the exercises at the nearby Israeli colony instead of where my house is.”

Israeli troops conduct drills in the Jordan Valley because the typography is very similar to that of southern Lebanon, where the Hezbollah militant group is based.

Israel and Hezbollah have fought several wars with each other.

“The Jordan Valley is a large area, but the Israeli army deliberately conducts military exercises near residential areas to displace those people from their houses,” Khaled Mansour, the coordinator of the Palestinian Agriculture Relief told Gulf News.

“Israeli authorities consider them Bedouins (nomads with no claim to the land) in order to justify their displacement, but this is simply false.”

“Many of them are landowners who grow crops and own livestock,” Mansour said.

“They prevent them from feeding their cattle, they routinely damage water pipes, and prevent them from digging wells,” Mansour said.

“Even when international organisations help them out by building facilities, those too are destroyed,” he said.

Evacuations typically last two to three days at a time and the families are forced to seek refuge in nearby villages.

“When we resisted evacuation, they shelled us. Shells hit near my house and shrapnels were everywhere,” Abu Kbash said.

“Thank God no one was hurt. But from then on, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk. I am a father and I am responsible for protecting my children’s lives,” he said.

Abu Kbash said many times he wasn’t given enough time to remove his 200 sheep. So he left them behind knowing that they could be easily killed in the military drills cross fire.

Two years ago, Abu Kbash lost seventy acres of wheat crop that caught fire from an Israeli shell.

The Jordan Valley region is Palestine’s food basket, and is very important to national food security. Israel has announced plans to permanently annex the area which already is home to dozens of Jewish colonies.

Israeli authorities make lives of Palestinians as difficult as possible — and for no apparent reason other than to annoy them into leaving the area.

The Palestinian National Authority can only provide basic support like food, water and legal advisers, Abu Kbash said.

“They cannot stop this from happening. Neither can human rights groups,” he said.

“They want us to abandon our land, but we will never cave into their pressure tactics. All we can do is to endure.”

source: GULF NEWS