... and family number 2

In 2005, Waled and his wife Abeer were happily living in their home in Wadrahal, within the district of Bethlehem, where their families had lived for generations. Abeer was expecting their first baby, due in a few weeks. 




Then a letter arrived to say that the Israeli Military had deemed the house a security threat and would be demolished. Waled needed to go to the court in Ramallah on the following Thursday if he wished to challenge this order. Waled was on his way to Ramallah when the bulldozer arrived and destroyed his house and the one next door - shown in the picture.

Abeer was at home alone and was so traumatised by the experience that she lost her baby. The family were forced to live in a tent among the ruins for 5 months. Then Abeer's sister offered them one room of her two roomed house. 





The Holy Land Trust decided to rebuild the house. In 2008, they organised international volunteers to pay a share of the cost and to come and work on the rebuilding. It took 45 days to build the new house. 


Since then Abeer has had two delightful twins - Fatima is in the picture with her mum. 

However, life is still complicated. Waled has a job in Jerusalem and so has a permit to travel into the city each day. Unfortunately, being Palestinian, he has to travel into Bethlehem and queue at the checkpoint. He leaves at 3am every day to join the queue of thousands who wait for the checkpoint to be opened. He gets back home between 8 and 9. 

In 2005, the nearest Israeli houses were over 2 kilometres away. Now the new settlement of Efrata can be seen just a few hundred yards in front of Waled and Abeer's house. A new road from the Efrata settlement gets the people living there into Jerusalem in about 20 minutes using special roads and tunnels available to Israelis only. 

The annexation wall will soon be extended and pass in front of the homes in this village, thus taking more land into Israel and making it more difficult to get around Palestine.