On Sunday, Israeli forces invaded the town of Jabal al-Mukaber, in the southeastern part of the Jerusalem municipality with an armored Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer and demolished a two-story home belonging to the Matar family, rendering eight family members homeless and wounding one family member who tried to protest the demolition.
The demolition was a punitive demolition, a form of collective punishment frequently enacted against Palestinian family members of a person charged with or convicted of a crime under Israeli martial law. Such collective punishment is a direct violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, but Israel carries out such attacks on a daily basis in Occupied Palestine.
In this case, the demolished home was the home of Palestinian prisoner Hussam Matar, who was the subject of an international human rights campaign in December when his health began to seriously deteriorate due to medical negligence, after he had been held in solitary confinement for 74 days.
Local sources reported that the Israeli occupation forces stormed Jabal al-Mukaber and proceeded to demolish a two-story house belonging to the Jerusalemite Ratib Matar. Ratib lived there with 7 members of his family, including his brother, the captive Hussam Matar.
According to the Palestinian Wafa News Agency, the Israeli occupation municipality crews began to unload the contents of the house, before demolishing the house, claiming that the house was “built without a permit”. This is a false pretext frequently used by Israeli authorities to justify their demolition policy – but the reality is that Israeli authorities have refused to issue any permits for Palestinian homes since they began their military occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967.
Ratib Matar’s house was constructed 15 years ago. At the time, for the ‘crime’ of building on their own land, Israeli authorities imposed a fine of more than 700,000 shekels on the family.
During the demolition, one member of the family was injured by rubber-coated metal bullets in the hand, after Israeli forces assaulted the residents in the vicinity of the house.
