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50 STORIES OF PALESTINIAN LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION

FUAD JABO

KHIRBET KHAMIS | BETHLEHEM

Fuad Jabo

❝Our lives have become so complicated, and we are under enormous pressure, psychological, financial and social.❞

Now home to a few dozens, Khirbet Khamis was among several communities that were incorporated into the Jerusalem municipal

boundary and unilaterally annexed to Israel.


However, unlike the vast majority of Palestinians in the annexed areas, Khirbet Khamis’ residents were issued West Bank, instead of Jerusalem, ID cards. As a result, under Israeli law, they are considered “illegal residents” in their own homes.


Khirbet Khamis has become an ❝open

air prison❞ for its residents, says Fuad

Jado, a 55-year-old father of five.


Our lives have become so complicated,
and we are under enormous pressure... We are not allowed to work in Israel although our community has been illegally annexed and we are now cut off from the rest of the West Bank on the Jerusalem side of the Wall.

❝This has changed all our lives. Our children, for example, have to cross checkpoints daily
to get to their school.

❝While there are no shops in the community we are limited in the quantity of food we can bring in from Bethlehem, especially dairy products.

Sometimes the soldiers throw them away if they think the quantities exceed our daily consumption; other times we do it

ourselves to avoid waiting for permission

to enter.


❝What are we supposed to do? They don’t allow us to shop in Jerusalem, so we sometimes have no choice but to rely on friends from Jerusalem to buy things

for us or risk going to Jerusalem markets

ourselves.❞

Map of Khirbet Khamis and its surroundings

Of particular concern to the community,

access to emergency service providers,

including ambulances and fire

brigades, has been impaired.


On several occasions, the inability to timely access emergency health service had had

tragic consequences; Fuad Jado recalls

one incident in 2005:


❝I lost my 70-year-old mother because the ambulance couldn’t reach us after she

suffered a severe stroke. 


❝I called the Red Crescent in Bethlehem, but they said they had to coordinate first with the Israeli Civil Administration to get permission to get an ambulance into Khirbet Khamis through the checkpoint, which may have taken up to an hour.

❝So I called an Israeli ambulance in Jerusalem, but they told me they couldn’t come because we live in a boundary area that is not within their coverage.

❝I had no choice but to carry my mother with the help of my nephew. We walked for nearly a kilometre until we found a gap in the Barrier. We left my mother there and went to look for a taxi to take her to Bethlehem.


❝When we came back she had died. At the hospital they told us that we had arrived too late. It would have taken only three minutes for an Israeli ambulance to reach us from Gilo, so maybe she could have been saved.❞

Case study on Khirbet Khamis

Based on a publication on dislocated communities focusing on the case of Khirbet Khamis | November 2013

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