PHOTOGRAPHY | PALESTINE
Welcome to Iqrit
Visit to a Destroyed Palestinian Village
Oct. 11½ , 2023
Welcome to Iqrit.
This is the church, and that’s the cemetery. Nothing else remains from this hamlet in the North of Palestine. Across the valley we see the village of Boustane in Lebanon. There is no official sign on the road designating Iqrit, only a name painted on a half-shack erected by the residents to guard the grounds. Around the church is a field of stones flattened into the ground — the remains of the homes of the 50 families that had once inhabited the village.
Unlike 450 other villages that Israel destroyed in 1948, Iqrit survived the occupation intact, its residents living in it. Ten days after its occupation in November, the Israeli army ordered the villagers to leave their homes for two weeks, while they conducted operations to secure the border and prevent infiltration from Lebanon. The villagers wanted no trouble, so reluctantly moved to stay temporarily with friends and relatives in the neighboring village of al-Rama.
When it was time to return, the army refused to let them back. They appealed to higher authorities, eventually winning a case in Israel’s supreme court, which ordered the army to let the villagers back to their homes. Before the deadline imposed by the court, the army brought bulldozers and flattened everything, leaving only the church and the cemetery.
The villagers kept appealing, uncomfortable at having stayed too long with their neighbors in Rama. The prime minister formed a commission to look into their pleas, involving multiple government agencies and departments — the ministries of housing, health, water, defense, agriculture, …. After years of meetings and consultations, the commission reported that they have no objections regarding the return of the residents to their village grounds, but by then the government had changed, and the request was denied.
Another commission looked into it, then another, trapping the villagers in decades of bureaucratic hell, while their village lands lay fallow, and the rubble of their homes buried deep. It took them decades to win the right to redecorate the church and hold services there, and to bury their dead in the cemetery. Only recently were they able to erect tents and hold gatherings and events on the village grounds. Still, the only time anyone is allowed to return permanently to Iqrit was after they died.
Standing there in the refreshing cool air of the upper Galilee, I struggled to hold back tears as I listened to Sami — a descendant of the village — tell his story and their struggle to return. What made it painful was the complete absence of hate or animosity in his voice, despite the sheer cruelty they had to endure for 75 years. All he wanted was to return to the village and rebuild his parents’ house.
It did not matter that the village was overwhelmingly Christian.
To the Israelis, as to us,
We are all Palestinian!
With love from Palestine,
© Ramsey Hanhan, 2023
