THE Palestinian Christian family whose land near Bethlehem was seized by Israeli settlers at the end of July were victims of an “abhorrent attack and dispossession”, the Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, has said.
Speaking in the House of Lords last week, Bishop Treweek said: “We must not lose sight of the Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank.”
At the end of July, the Kisiya family were evicted from a farm in Al-Makhrour, a valley near Bethlehem, where they had lived since the 1960s. A member of the family, Alice Kisiya, told the Church Times that they had been expelled despite possessing documents from the Civil Administration — the Israeli body governing the occupied West Bank — confirming the Kisiya family’s ownership of the land.
According to a report in The New Arab, an Israeli court last year sided with a subsidiary of the Jewish National Fund, a body that supports the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and which claims to own the land.
On Wednesday, Ms Kisiya suggested that settlers were taking advantage of the war in Gaza to dispossess her family, after two decades of harassment. “We’ve been suffering for more than 20 years with this, but we’re fighting back,” she said.
The family was evicted on 31 July, after a stand-off with settlers accompanied by Israeli troops.
Ms Kisiya said that Al-Makhrour was one of the majority-Christian areas of the West Bank, and that the campaign to protect the land for Palestinian habitation was “about the protection we ask for the Christians of Bethlehem”.
In August, an interfaith march took place in Al-Makhrour, and a global vigil is being planned for 29 September.
The Dean of St George’s College, Jerusalem, the Very Revd Canon Richard Sewell, who attended the march, said this week that the “cry of the Kisiya family must be heard”, and that the family “must be restored to what is theirs by legal right”.
If the Kisiya family were not protected, “all Christians become more vulnerable,” he said. “Imagine the day when there may be no Christians left in the birthplace of Jesus Christ.”
The family’s situation was discussed during a meeting at Lambeth Palace on Tuesday held by the Archbishop of Canterbury with Palestinian Christians. The human-rights lawyer Dalia Qumsieh and the campaigner Mays Nassar were present, and joined the Archbishop for evening prayer.
The pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, in Bethlehem, the Revd Dr Munther Isaac, could not be at the meeting in person because of the closure of the crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, but he joined by video link. In February, Archbishop Welby apologised for having previously declined to meet Dr Isaac (News, 29 February).
Archbishop Welby said afterwards that he had thanked God “for their faithfulness”. He had been “profoundly grieved by what I heard today, and I cry out to God for the war in Gaza to stop. How many more stories of families, homes and communities destroyed must we hear before this senseless killing ceases?”
The Archbishop did not refer explicitly to the Kisiya’s case, but said: “The violence, land theft, and repression being endured by Palestinians, including the Christian community, in the West Bank is intolerable and must cease.”
He reiterated calls for a ceasefire, the release of hostages, and unfettered access for aid workers.
This week there was renewed focus on the occupied West Bank, after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) admitted that it was “highly likely” that their troops killed Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a US and Turkish citizen who was protesting against land seizures in the area.
Last Friday, Ms Eygi had been in Beita, near Nablus, in the north of the occupied West Bank, when she was shot and killed while taking part in a demonstration against the expansion of Israeli settlements.
An IDF statement said that it was “highly likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot”.
The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, responded to the admission by saying that Israeli forces must “make some fundamental changes in the way that they operate in the West Bank”.
BBC News reported Mr Blinken as saying that “no-one should be shot and killed for attending a protest, no-one should have to put their life at risk just for freely expressing their views.”
Ms Eygi had been attending a protest against the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank when she was shot.
On Monday night, at least 19 people were killed in an air strike in a designated humanitarian zone in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, according to local health officials. A further 60 were injured, according to medical workers.
Footage of the site showed deep craters in the sand, and the remains of tents in which people displaced by bombing elsewhere in Gaza had been sheltering.
A spokesperson for the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said that “the use of heavy weapons in densely populated areas is unconscionable. . . Palestinians had moved to this area in Khan Younis in search for shelter, in search of safety, after being repeatedly instructed to do so by the Israeli authorities themselves.”
A statement from the IDF described the attack as “a precise strike on a number of senior Hamas terrorists who were operating within a command and control centre embedded inside the humanitarian area” and questioned the reliability of the number of casualties reported by the Gazan health ministry.
The number killed in Gaza since 7 October last year stands at more than 40,000, according to officials there. The New York Times this week reported UN figures showing that in the same period more than 600 people have been killed in the West Bank, either by the IDF or Israeli settlers.