Israel demolishes widow’s family home
Israeli forces blew up the home of Farouq Ramadan's widow and five daughters, three weeks after he was killed in a settler raid on their village.
Israeli forces blew up the family apartment of Farouq Ramadan on Tuesday morning, leaving his wife and five daughters without a home three weeks after soldiers and settlers killed him.
The blast came at around 8:15am in Tal, a village southwest of Nablus, according to the village’s mayor, Walid Zaidan. “The Israeli army blew up the apartment where the martyr Farouq Ramadan lived with his wife and five daughters,” he said. Roughly 30 military vehicles and army engineering teams had moved into Tal the evening before, forcing residents out of 30 surrounding houses so the demolition could go ahead. Israeli army radio later described the two weeks it took from demolition order to detonation as “unprecedented record time.”
That speed only makes sense against what happened on 24 July. Around 25 to 30 armed Israeli settlers raided Tal at about 7am, trying to force their way into homes near the illegal outpost of Havat Gilad. When residents came out to stop them, the settlers opened fire, wounding a child. Israeli soldiers then arrived and began shooting alongside them. “The residents came out to confront them, and the settlers opened fire,” local leader Essam Saifi said afterwards. Four Palestinians were killed, among them Ramadan, who during the confrontation seized a weapon and shot at least one Israeli before he was killed himself, though it remains unclear, even on Israeli reporting, whether the Israeli casualty died from Palestinian fire or from his own side’s. “Farouq was defending himself, his uncle and his cousins,” local journalist Firas al-Saifi said.
The Israeli military’s account of that day looks very different. Its statement on Tuesday said it had “demolished the house where the terrorist who carried out the shooting” had lived, and pledged to “continue to take proactive and offensive action to thwart terrorism throughout Judea and Samaria.” Nobody in that statement is a widow or a five-year-old.
A policy with a name
What happened to Ramadan’s family since 24 July has followed a familiar pattern. His wounded brother Orwa was reportedly removed from his hospital bed at Nablus Specialty Hospital and remains in Israeli detention; another brother, Majd, was also detained despite reportedly playing no part in the clash. More than 100 Palestinians were rounded up across the West Bank in the days after the raid, more than 20 of them still held a week later. In the same window, settlers established at least six new unauthorised outposts on Palestinian land, including on Tal’s own fields, where hundreds of olive trees have already been uprooted.
Israel calls this deterrence. B’Tselem, HaMoked and Human Rights Watch call it collective punishment, banned under the Fourth Geneva Convention, imposed on people against whom Israel makes no allegation at all. Israel’s Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the practice, ruling that only the individual’s own residence is targeted, not the wider community. Tal’s demolished houses, and its uprooted olive trees, tell a different story to the people living, or no longer living, there.
Israeli forces demolished roughly 20 more Palestinian shops and homes the same day, in Anza village near Jenin, this time citing construction without a permit. Since October 2023, Palestinian tallies put West Bank deaths above a thousand. Farouq Ramadan’s widow and five daughters are not on that list. They are simply homeless.
