Israeli government accused of complicity as settlers demolish Jericho homes

Jericho, occupied West Bank – Where Palestinian homes once stood among orchards and swimming pools on the southwestern edge of Jericho, there is now only flattened earth.

Somewhere beneath the packed dirt lie entire houses, dumped into pits and smoothed over. Only a few severed water pipes hint that anyone ever lived here – that, and the piles of rubble yet to be buried by an Israeli settler’s excavator.

“Why do you hide the crime you’re committing?” asked Khalil al-Razim, 60, a Jerusalemite who has spent his summers on a plot of land here in the area of Ein al-Duyuk for more than a decade.

Beside al-Razim’s house, a pile of rubble more than two metres high blocks the entrance to the home of his neighbour, Mohammad Salah. Next to the pile, Salah stood with one of his four children. He now climbs his own fence to reach his house.

Six months earlier in February , during the first settler attack to tear through the area – with homes demolished and damaged, and residents attacked and robbed – a settler arrived with a bulldozer and began demolishing fences and houses in the neighbourhood, including parts of Salah’s home. This summer, the same work resumed under the guise of “clearing” the ruins those earlier attacks had left behind – and in the process, the Israeli excavator dumped piles of rubble in front of Salah’s home.

“How am I supposed to get into my own house?” Salah recalled asking the settler.

“That’s not my problem, how you get into your house,” the man told him, according to Salah. “Can’t get into your house? Go around another way from here. This land is not coming back to you.”

Since July 19, settler-operated excavators have kept coming on a near-daily basis – for the supposed purpose of “clearing waste”, but doing far more than that. The settler behind the attacks, identified by locals and in legal filings from the Israeli state as Hanan Herbst, is escorted by soldiers on every visit. No order has ever been shown to residents – no paper a lawyer can hold up in court. “Not an official order,” Salah said. “It’s all thuggery. Just brute force, nothing else.”