Briefing Paper September 2019 (22)
‘archaeological settlements’ are destroying Palestinian homes Mersiha Gadzo Al Jazeera 8/7/19
Fayyad Abu Rmeleh, 60, is afraid the floor and yard of his home will one day collapse. Every day, he says, from morning until late afternoon, the family hears the digging and drilling of tunnels beneath their building. The excavations conducted by Israeli authorities first began in 2000, but it was not until five years ago that they began to notice damage to their home. “It’s putting our lives in danger,” Abu Rmeleh told Al Jazeera. “Wherever you turn your head, you find new cracks. We don’t know how many tunnels are beneath our house, but we believe there are at least three.”
The 50-member Abu Rmeleh family lives in Silwan’s Wadi Hilweh neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, which has been marketed as the “City of David” tourist attraction, where some Israelis say King David of the Bible built the “original city of Jerusalem” some 3,000 years ago. Underneath their home, Israeli authorities have been digging tunnels, searching for traces of the Second Temple era. Long, jagged cracks have formed every which way in his home – on the stairs, by the windows in the bathroom and living room, while chunks of the wall in some areas have fallen out. On the outside of the house, a 1.5-metre-long crack stretches from the ground. But his nephew’s home, located in the same building, was the most badly damaged. He was forced to move out with his wife and five children in early 2018 as the ground weakened and could barely hold the walls…
Israeli authorities last week inaugurated the newly excavated tunnel “Path of the Pilgrims” that extends from Wadi Hilweh to the Western Wall, just outside the Al Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City …
Archaeologist, Yonathan Mizrachi, CEO of the Israeli NGO Emek Shaveh, told Al Jazeera the tunnels that Israel has excavated in and around the Old City and in Silwan are “problematic”. To date, no academic or scientific report has been published on the tunnels, nor has any data been released as to what has been discovered … Furthermore, the tunnels have been excavated horizontally, breaking in practice with the 100-year-old accepted method of excavating vertically from the surface down, the method used by archaeologists worldwide, Mizrachi said. Information obtained from horizontal excavations is almost worthless …
Mizrachi said the tunnel excavations are “all part of a political agenda”. “Unfortunately, Israel is using these tunnels disguised as archaeological excavations but it’s actually part of the political goal to prevent Jerusalem from being part of any political solution,”
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