Demolitions in Samra

A group of 10 activists from Brighton & Sheffield are spending up to a month in the Jordan valley, to bear witness to and help prevent, where possible, the continued dispossession of the Palestinians and destruction of their property by the Israeli army and settlers. This is an extremely fertile area and it has always been Israel’s policy, ever since the Allon Plan in 1969, to keep the Jordan Valley for ‘security’ reasons.

What is shown below is heartbreaking and is something that is rarely mentioned in the West.
Please do follow the blog of their visit and also you can receive more information about the demolition orders received at Al Samra at

Tony Greenstein

Monday, 11 April 2011

What we're doing now

Hi,

No posts for a while as things have been very busy. We are focussing on writing for the www.jordanvalleysolidarity.org website. Now there are ten of us here from Brighton and Sheffield we have been splitting up.

Last Thursday there was a wave of destruction by the Army in the Jordan Valley, starting with Aqaba, moving on to Samra, then a small community north of Jericho.

Since then we have been to Bil'in, Ramallah, Nablus, Asira, Iraq Burin and Hebron. We are now back in the Jordan Valley for our last couple of days.

Today some of us will visit the bedouin community between Lower and Upper Fasayil. who are facing iminent demolitions, and the bedouin community in Al Auja to start making mud bricks with them for their new school.

Demolitions in Samra

After noon on 7th April the army demolished three large animal shelters and a kitchen in the farming community of Al Samra in the northern Jordan Valley.
We arrived just after the demolitions to find the families devastated, and the grandparents visibly upset. They received demolition orders for the third time on Tuesday 29th March, and were given just 3 days to destroy their own buildings, making it virtually impossible for the to make an appeal through the courts. When the army did not demolish their buildings straight away they became hopeful that they would be able to get a freeze on the demolition order, but their hopes were destroyed today. The grandmother was crying at the sight of the destruction, and that the sheep and goats were now out in the afternoon sun without any shade.
The animals were all crowding under the tractors and water tanks to try to find their own shade. As well as the animal shelters, the army also destroyed the small kitchen of a family with a young baby, aged just 20 days old. You can more information about the demolition orders received at Al Samra at

Jordan Valley being segregated from rest of West Bank

Over the last week diggers and bulldozers have been seen enlarging the trench and earth mound that are the beginnings of Israel's apartheid eastern wall that aims to segregate the Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank.

Although it looks like a fairly innocuous earth mound for anyone driving along the Allon Road, if you then take a closer look you find a massive trench the other side. This makes it impossible for any vehicles to cross, and extremely difficult for anyone to cross on foot.

Like the wall all around the West Bank, the aim is to annex land to the Israeli state and their illegal colonies, and in the process divides communities, prevents Palestinians from accessing their land, water sources, health services or education.

There is one gate in the wall in the Al Hadidiya / Ras Ar Ahmar / Atuf area, which is opened for just half an hour twice a week.

Running water to Al Farisiya

Thursday, 31 March 2011 08:23

In the autumn of 2010 Jordan Valley Solidarity ran water to the farming village of Al Farisiya, who have been persistently harrassed by the Israeli occupation in recent years in an attempt to confiscate their land and ethnically cleanse the area of Palestinians.