Friday, September 16

The poorest are kicked out of their homes

Zawah is in her forties, but looks in her 60-ies. Sorrow has aged her prematurely . She is crippled and half blind, a result of her diabetes. She also suffers from chronic bronchitis and very high blood pressure. Her kidneys don't work too well either. Every few months she is hospitalised.

She is a widow with an 18-year old daughter, a student.


Her only daughter often misses classes, as she has to take care of her mother. When not at home, Zawah's daughter always worries her mother might loose consciousness and fall.
Her daughter used to work as a house cleaner and sales girl, yet she was fired for loosing too many workhours, hours she spent caring for her ill mother.

The Halamish (public housing company of deserved ill repute) owned house...:

There is no glass in the huge living room window looking out over the sea (
true they have a million $ view of the Meditarrenean, but that's where the nice things stop.). There are no blinds either. So when it rains or storms, it gets wet and cold, very cold.
There is no bathroom floor and a small gardenhose leads from the bath tub to the neighbor down below as, there being no floor, there is no bath sewage pipe either.

In the kitchen there are no tiles, only a broken wall. But then, many of the walls are broken, huge cracks.

The electricity wiring sticks out from the wall. Scary given the rain coming in. The electricity comes form a neighbor, as the house was disconnected by the electricity company many months ago.
The same goes for the water, the municipality cut off the water supply a long time ago. Too many unpaid bills.

Zawah receives a tiny widows pension (1658 NIS a month, about US $ 364) .
She is probably elegible for invalid social security payment, but she is too ill to take care of this. The burocracy is staggering and she has no mony for public transport to go the the various offices. She's too ill.
The same goes for the discounts which she can probably get ( municipal taxes and her rent)

She used to receive food parcels every now and then, but they stopped arriving for an unknown reason and it's too hard for her to go to her social worker. she, almost blind, can hardly move, and only leaves to house to go to her GP.
She is supposed to make monthly visits to the specialists clinic at Wolfson Hospital. Not that far from the Kedem public housing estate where she lives, but she has no money for the bus, so she hasn't seen the specialists for ages.
Yet she needs their reports to qualify for an invalids social security payment.

Food: Zawah and her daughter often go hungry.

And ofcourse she has not paid the rent for ages, 618 NIS is a lot of money for her. She and her daighter live on 1680 a month.

As a result they want to kick her out of her place. The windowless, bathroomless place she calls home.

And she is not the only one. Yesterday 5 other families were served expulsion orders, families with children, an elderly cancer patient 3 weeks after an operation and undergoing chemotherapy. And the list goes on. ALL are Palestinian families. Weak families.

Halamish has a new general manager who apparently needs to make a show. Let us know he is The Man.

And that's very easy, especially when you attack the weakest members of a community. Sure, they have rental debts, ofcourse they have rent debts. They need to spend their money on food, medicine, school books fro their children etc..
They have been unemployed and their social assistance has been minimalized way below the poverty line. Many of them are hungry.
And now they are kicking them out of their homes.
Their lousy homes, homes unfit to house people. But they are homes and the people have no where to go.

Is there anybody out there? Does anyone listen?








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