“I hate them,” Haya quickly retorted. “They make me feel frightened… because they all have guns.”
Sakina al-Gharib, 74, remembers when she first moved into her white stone house. It was more than 40 years ago, soon after marrying her husband Sabri, who died in 2012.
Nestled on a hilltop near their occupied West Bank village of Beit Ijza – just north of Jerusalem – Sakina would wake up each morning and look out at the rolling hills of olive trees lighting up under the rising sun.
“We were the only family on this hilltop,” Sakina told The Electronic Intifada. “It was very quiet and peaceful. We used to be able to see the Mediterranean Sea from here. It was the perfect place to raise our children.”
The family built this home in 1979 on 100,000 square meters of land, which has been in their possession since Ottoman times.
Now, however, the Jews have confiscated almost all their land and their home is surrounded by an eight-meter high iron fence. The hills of olive trees have been replaced by villas – two or three stories high – built on their family land for the colonialist Jews in violation of international law.
