The Atrash family has been building its new home for three years. Israeli forces destroyed it in two hours
Lying in bed early on Tuesday morning, Marwa al-Atrash, her husband Maher, and their five children were still just waking up when they got a call from their neighbours. Israeli soldiers were about to destroy their home.
"It was around 8am when the neighbours called, telling us to come quickly, and that there were bulldozers and hundreds of Israeli soldiers outside our house," an exhausted Marwa told Middle East Eye.
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| Marwa and Maher al-Atrash stand with their son by the rubble of their new home |
Marwa, 25, and Maher, 45, woke their sleepy children and rushed them out of their rented flat and headed to Qalqas, a neighbourhood on the edges of Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank, where their new home was being constructed.
"When we arrived, we saw hundreds of Israeli soldiers surrounding the area, and bulldozers destroying the house," Marwa said. "I started yelling and doing everything I could to try and get to the front door and into the house."
"I thought that if I could get into the house, then they wouldn't be able to destroy it," she added, recalling her desperation to save her family's new home. They had been building it for the past three years.
"But when I tried, the soldiers started pushing me, grabbing me, and hitting me with their guns," she said.
"In the end I couldn't save our home. Within two hours, the house was destroyed, and they left us with the rubble."
Dreams destroyed
Videos of Israeli forces demolishing the Atrash family home, as Marwa and her mother screamed and fought with soldiers, went viral on Palestinian social media on Tuesday.
A clip of a distraught Marwa comforting her 13-year-old step-son as he cried watching the soldiers has been shared tens of thousands of times.
In the video, a distraught Marwa can be seen wiping away the boy's tears, saying: "Don't be upset, we will build another [house], even better than this one."
"When I saw my son crying and screaming as he watched the soldiers destroy his home, all I could think about was how this was going to affect him for years to come, for the rest of his life," she said.
"I wanted to take away his pain and suffering in that moment. I was worried that he was going to fall into a depression," Marwa said. "I can't describe what we were feeling at that moment."
Standing next to the rubble of their home with his wife and five children, all aged between three and 13, Maher said the events of Tuesday were the toughest moments of his life.
"We poured years of our lives and hard work into building this house, to build a future for our children," he said.
"It was a dream of ours to live in our own house as a family, instead of constantly moving between rental houses."
After three years of construction, the family had been putting their final touches to the house, and were close to moving in. In recent weeks, the family had been slowly taking their belongings into the house, in the hope they'd be able to move in in the new year.
"They didn't even give us a warning, or a chance to take out all our belongings from the house," Maher said.
"They just destroyed it all."
Maher said that, over the years, he and his family had put close to 350,000 shekels (around $112,000) into the construction. He said he still owed around 150,000 shekels to contractors and others.
"All of these years of hard work, and they destroyed it in minutes. And there was nothing we could do to stop them," he said.
"We screamed, and cried, and begged them to stop, but at the end of the day, we were standing in the face of an army who wanted to destroy our home. What could we do?"
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