The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has embarked on studying the possibility of opening an investigation into the destruction of homes and the displacement of dozens of Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley village of Khirbet Humsa.
According to Haaretz website the ICC prosecutor’s office is mulling probing what happened in the village in response to a petition filed by “the Combatants for Peace” organization which termed the Israeli practice “a war crime.”
The incident occurred last month when the Israeli occupation army’s civil administration wreaked havoc on homes and structures and confiscated the belongings of about 60 Palestinians in the village which is located in an area that the army deliberately declared a firing zone. It was the third demolition campaign of this kind in one year.
The villagers told Haaretz that in last February they were told that if they moved 15 kilometers west they would be able to get back the things that had been confiscated from them but they turned down the offer for an alternative site.
“While military forces are acting to expel the shepherd community in Khirbet Humsa they were able to find creative solutions for settlers living in and near Firing Zone 903 which shows that the need for ‘training’ is just an excuse to make demographic changes” Combatants for Peace said in its ICC appeal.
“Beyond the fact that army training can’t be regarded as an urgent military need in the case of Khirbet Humsa that reasoning doesn’t apply since the army does not want the residents to return to their place of residence in or near the firing zone at the end of the training” the organization wrote.
“Instead the army has issued demolition orders and has destroyed the residents’ temporary structures confiscated their meager belongings and has put them under immense pressure to voluntarily move somewhere else” it added.
According to the left-wing rights group B’Tselem about 2700 people live in approximately 20 shepherding communities in areas declared by the army as firing zones or adjacent to them in the Jordan Valley.
The residents of Khirbet Humsa who mainly work as shepherds come from the village of As Samu in the southern West Bank. They came to the Northern Jordan Valley in the 1970s as areas available for shepherding began to diminish or water sources were closed due to army restrictions and settlement construction. After the 1948 war many As Samu families lost their lands which ended up being under Israeli control behind the Green Line.
