Land Research Center

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Violation: orders of suspension of work.

Location: the villages of Jiftlik and Marj Na`ja, north of Jericho.

Violation date: 08/07/2022.

The aggressor: the so-called civil administration of the occupation.

Affected side: Three farming families from the area.

Violation details:

The Israeli occupation continues to target Palestinian areas in the Jordan Valley. Over the past years, a number of residential and agricultural facilities have been notified. The occupation seeks to restrict the residents and deprive them of their natural right to build on the land they inherited from father to grandfather.

It is worth mentioning that the so-called construction inspector of the Israeli Civil Administration stormed on the morning of Sunday, August 7, 2022, the “Khzouk Musa” area, north of the village of Marj Na’ja, and notified to stop work in an agricultural water pool dug into the ground with a capacity of 1200 cubic meters, which is used for the purposes of providing irrigation water for about 350 palm trees owned by farmer Hussein Saleh Suleiman Daraghmeh.

The situation was repeated in the “Al-Makhrouq” area located to the east of the village of Al-Jiftlik, where the construction inspector of the occupation raided the area on the same day, and commercial stores on an area of 350 m² were notified to stop work and construction owned by the citizen Hani Abdel Aziz Labad Atawneh, in addition to a notification to stopping work on another small house under construction, owned by Abd al-Rahim Hassan Ahmad Sbeitan.

According to the notifications issued by the occupation, the date of (24/8/2022) was set as the date for a session of the Construction and Organization Committee, to discuss “the demolition of the building or the return of the place to its previous state,” as this committee takes the settlement of “Beit El” as its headquarters. Note that the occupation rejects license applications even if the application meets the basic conditions, as the occupation aims to tighten the screws on the citizens and deprive them of their most basic human rights.

The following table shows the names of the owners of the notified facilities and information about them:

It is noteworthy that the citizen Hussein Saleh Daraghmeh is considered one of the few farmers who are still exploiting the lands located in the “Khazouk Musa” area and in the “Umm Al-Abr” area, as the occupation turned most of the lands there into military closed areas due to its location overlooking the Jordanian-Palestinian borders. Regarding the nature of what happened, farmer Hussein Saleh Daraghmeh (53 years) told the field researcher the following:

“Khazouk Musa” is historically considered one of the agricultural areas that constituted a main source of income for a large number of families here, but after the 1967 war, the occupation stripped most of the citizens of their natural right to cultivate the land and most of the lands were declared closed militarily. But despite the harassment of the occupation, I cultivated land with palms on an area of 19 dunums and also established a water pool at my own expense, for irrigation, and I only want to live in peace and use my land, but despite that, the occupation pursues me wherever I am, even the trees and the water pond have become an enemy of the occupation that is trying to empty the area, but even so, I am determined to stay”.

The field researcher had previously observed that the occupation demolished an agricultural room belonging to Hussein Daraghmeh in the “Umm Al-Obour” area in the north of Jericho Governorate, on the pretext of not having a license, knowing that the room had been in existence for more than 60 years, and the citizen had carried out some maintenance on it.

The same is true in the village of Al-Jiftlik, in which the occupation demolished dozens of residential and agricultural facilities, and the most notified number of these facilities, which exceeded 100 facilities only over the past four years, not to be counted.

Despite this, the residents of the Jordan Valley insist on staying firm on their lands in light of a fierce campaign aimed at uprooting them from the area and dramatically changing its character in order to serve the threatening settlement projects there.