A Bedouin family gets evicted by Israel, and their baby gets killed
Amira Hass Haaretz 17/8/19
In her 2-month life, her tent was demolished twice. She died in an accident and her mother was seriously injured, the day after the family was evicted by Israel. For 50 communities in the Jordan Valley, such evictions are common
Sarah Ka‘abneh, 24, doesn’t know yet that her 2-month-old daughter Hana has died. For nearly two weeks the mother has been unconscious in intensive care at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem. When the accident happened on the morning of August 5, she had the baby in her arms. She was sitting in a cart harnessed to a tractor driven by her father-in-law. Her eldest son Khaled, 2, her mother-in-law and her parents-in-law’s young children sat to each side, among the family’s meagre belongings.
Sarah’s husband, Odeh Ka‘abneh, took the sheep out to pasture and knew nothing until 9am, when his cousins found him in the hills and told him. He was always a man of few of words, and since he buried his tiny daughter and saw his wife badly bruised on the face and then linked up to various IVs at the hospital, he has been saying even less. This Bedouin family is no stranger to seasonal wandering between two permanent sites and searching for food for the sheep. But this time the wandering was premature, forced. On August 4, a day before the disaster, a Civil Administration inspector appeared at the family’s encampment near al-Hadidiya in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank. He ordered the family to move away from the place where they and their herd stay several months each year during the warm weather. About half an hour earlier, Odeh says, a settler from the settlement of Ro’i showed up and also ordered them out. . . . .
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