reality in palestine; go find yourself another home case this is ours;

 

Iman Jahjouh was putting her daughters to bed when the soldiers came through the door early this week. A 33-year-old widow, Iman has been living in a house near her parents’ in the Qalandia refugee camp, close to the camp’s entrance and the airport road. She knows this makes her a target, since her husband’s family cut ties with her after his death.

Her two daughters, eight and ten years old, were still awake when the army raided the building during one of the recent incursions last Tuesday. What she remembers most is not the noise. “They came in and told my parents, word for word: ‘pack your things and go to a European country. This land is ours,’” she tells Mondoweiss.

Since that night, her older daughter asks every day whether they will have to leave the house. The younger one wakes in a panic at any sound from the street. “I started becoming afraid of the question itself,” Iman says. “Where would we even go?”

The threat her family received, alongside the practice of soldiers declaring residential houses a military command center and ordering their occupants out during incursions, has become one of the defining testimonies of a series of Israeli military incursions at Qalandia, just outside of Ramallah. Since January of this year, these invasions have escalated dramatically, and they follow a pattern that residents and analysts say cannot be separated from Israel’s expanding settlement ambitions in the area surrounding the old Qalandia airport......more...........