Property Seizures in Gaza, West Bank Widen Chasm

Abdel Karim Tamimi has new neighbors.

Israeli soldiers arrived at his home in this Palestinian village last week, took over the second floor, ejected Tamimi’s adult son and planted their flag on the roof.

The soldiers told Tamimi that they were seizing his house for security reasons. From their new vantage point, the soldiers can observe a nearby Palestinian police checkpoint and scan miles of surrounding territory. While the troops live on the second floor, the Tamimi family remains on the first.

Something very similar happened to Nasser Tanatra, who lives down the road in another Palestinian village, Umm Safa. Israeli troops took over the top floor of a new house he built for his son. They sandbagged most of the windows and doors.

From the Palestinian point of view, these takeovers are part of a wider campaign that includes house demolitions and the confiscation or razing of farmland. The goal, they say, is collective punishment and the prevention of Palestinian independence.

From the Israeli point of view, these are steps designed to protect Jewish citizens, especially settlers who have repeatedly come under deadly fire on West Bank and Gaza Strip roads during the last 10 months of violence.

Under international law, an occupying army can temporarily seize private property to counter a serious security threat to military forces. But human rights experts in Israel and abroad say such action must be “proportional,” and they question the endangerment or punishment of one group of civilians, the Palestinian homeowners, to guard another, the settlers.

In the extreme scenario, some Palestinians fear that Israel is consolidating forward positions for greater incursions into their territory. Israeli officials insist that the takeovers and confiscations are temporary.

“In places where we need to confiscate a house or build a new post, we will do it,” said Lt. Col. Yarden Vatikay, a spokesman for Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer. “We know it hurts the Palestinian people, and we’re sorry, but none of it would happen if they would be quiet and put an end to the violence.

“We are talking about lives, not quality of life.”

Of at least 130 Israelis killed since the uprising began, nearly 40 were settlers, most of them slain in roadway ambushes or drive-by shootings. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed in the same period.

Tamimi can peer through the grape arbor outside his living room to see the M-16s and sandbags of the Israeli soldiers who now live upstairs. For him, their presence is the ultimate indignity.

“They put a flag on top of your house to shame you,” said the 59-year-old retired high school principal. As though in competition, about half a dozen Palestinian flags have sprouted up around the Tamimi house, on a water tower and in the town square.

The soldiers, backed by armored personnel carriers, came about 3:30 in the morning, woke the sleeping Tamimis and informed them that they wanted the house.

“I was shocked,” Tamimi said. “I didn’t understand what he meant. I was worried they were going to arrest my son. It never occurred to me they were going to take over the house.”

When he began to grasp what was happening, he asked why.

“Orders,” came the reply. He had 10 minutes to remove his belongings.

Roused by the ruckus, the entire town--most of which belongs to the Tamimi clan--poured out into the early morning darkness, surrounding the home and the soldiers. After a lot of shoving and pushing, the troops finally subdued the crowd with tear gas. By Tamimi’s account, about 15 villagers were injured in the melee and one was arrested.

All of this, Tamimi says, reminds him of the old days of military occupation after Israel seized the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East War and through the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. The army often took up positions on the roofs of private homes or stores. But for Tamimi, this is worse.

“This is the hardest thing I ever witnessed,” he said. “In the old intifada, the soldiers would come and go. They were nasty--they’d come on raids and turn the whole house upside down [looking for weapons]. But they’d never confiscate the house.”

Israel says that Nabi Saleh and neighboring Umm Safa, which flank two Jewish settlements, have been used as firing positions by Palestinian gunmen shooting at settlers on a central road just below the villages. In this area, two settlers have been killed and dozens wounded or fired at.

Itzik Shadmi, a software executive who lives in one of the Jewish settlements, Neve Tsuf, said he feels safer since the army moved into Nabi Saleh and Umm Safa.

“They gave us more soldiers, and the situation is better,” said Shadmi, 51.

In Umm Safa, the Israelis took the top floor of Nasser Tanatra’s three-story house, located in the middle of the village, next to a mosque, a nursery and other homes. It is on a rise, towering above the other buildings and affording a bird’s-eye view of the road below.

“If I had known the Israelis were going to take it, I would never have built the top floor,” Tanatra, 62, said ruefully as he gave a visitor a tour. A soldier with binoculars tracked every move of the homeowner and his guest. Construction was finished only recently, and only the ground floor was occupied, by Tanatra’s daughter and her family. The top floor was meant for a son about to be married.

The trouble in Umm Safa began weeks before Tanatra’s house was occupied. Settlers who have come under fire retaliated by attacking Umm Safa property, according to the villagers. And some villagers fought back until the army intervened.

The army has closed off Nabi Saleh and Umm Safa, as with many villages, by tearing up or dumping debris onto the roads.

Israel has made several incursions into, but not permanently taken, land in the so-called Area A, regions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip under full Palestinian civil and security control.

Israel operates most frequently in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip where it retained security control under terms of the landmark 1993 Oslo accords that set a now-dead peace process in motion. Israel thus maintains that it has legal authority to seize land or property for security purposes. These actions are gradual and often obscured by the more heated rhetoric of the Israeli-Palestinian debate that warns of full-scale war and assassination plots targeting top Palestinian leaders.

With comparatively little outcry, Palestinians charge, Israel is chipping away at Palestinian territory through settlement expansion, new roads and the clearing of land--and in so doing, they say, is further hobbling a future state.

On the edge of the West Bank village of Abud, the army abruptly set down a new position about a month ago after a settler was killed in the area. Hundreds of trees were uprooted, and the village of 4,000 was put under closure. Fourteen tanks were visible the other day.

In the Gaza Strip, vast swaths of land have been cleared and, by Palestinian count, 260 homes destroyed in what Israel says are operations to remove cover used by Palestinian gunmen and to make roads safe for the estimated 7,000 Jewish settlers who live among more than 1 million Palestinians.

Officially, Israel says it doesn’t intend to reoccupy the West Bank or Gaza Strip.

“We have no intentions of conquering Palestinian land or hurting the civilian people,” said Vatikay, the defense spokesman. “But the situation is terror and terror, and terror leaves us no choice.”