On Sunday, 16 July 2023, members of the Widady a -Tahta community were forced to abandon their place of residence in fear for their lives due to state-backed settler violence and other abuses carried out by the Israeli authorities.
Residents of the community – who belong to the extended Abu ‘Awad family and number 20 people in total, including 12 minors – loaded all their belongings onto trucks and left the family’s compound, where they lived for 50 years.
Khirbet Widady consisted of two communities until now, Khirbet Widady a-Tahta and Khirbet Widaday a-Foqa, where five families numbering 22 people in total, including 13 minors, remain. These communities – like all the communities Israel is working to expel – have never been connected to the water and electricity grids. They have relied on water stored in cisterns and, in recent years, acquired solar panels that provide limited electricity.
Approximately two years ago, Israeli settlers built an outpost roughly 500 meters away from the Abu-‘Awad family homes in Widady a-Tahta, and ever since – with the help of Israeli soldiers – have tried to prevent them from grazing their flock in the pasturelands surrounding their homes, by way of – among other things – flying drones that scare the sheep and disperse them.
At the end of 2022, B’Tselem documented two settler attacks on the family’s homes (24 December 2022; 31 December 2022).
In March 2023, B’Tselem documented two more attacks, one in the presence of an Israeli soldier (4 March 2023; 11 March 2023).
Additionally, about a year ago, the Civil Administration issued demolition orders for all structures in the compound, which consist of three homes and one livestock enclosure.
On Tuesday, 27 June 2023, at approximately 4:00 P.M., two Israeli settlers arrived at the community and threatened Salah Abu ‘Awad (27) with handguns while he was grazing his flock near his home. Abu ‘Awad fled, leaving the flock behind, and watched from a distance as the settlers led his sheep toward Route 60. He called other family members for help, and when the settlers saw them, they left the flock and went toward their outpost. The family brought the flock back to their community. When Abu ‘Awad reported the incident to the police, the officers claimed they could not assist him because the community was living on leased land that did not belong to its residents.
Immediately following the incident and in the wake of the police’s response, the Abu ‘Awad family decided that remaining at the site put their lives at risk and began preparations to leave. Read more...
