Broken Homes: Addressing the impact of house demolitions on Palestinian children and families

Over 300,000 people are under threat of house demolition and of being displaced, without warning, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This report outlines what we’ve found and what we’re calling for.

Published
June 2009

Since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and Gaza, it is estimated that Israeli civil and military authorities have destroyed 18,000 Palestinian homes in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT).

The rate of house demolitions has risen significantly since the second intifada began in September 2000 and, as this study shows, house demolitions have become a major cause of forced displacement in the OPT.

When a home is demolished, a family loses both the house as a financial asset and often the property inside it. 

For the families surveyed in this study these losses respectively totalled an average of approximately $105,090 and $51,261 per family.

But the impact goes beyond loss of physical property and economic opportunity.

This report is unique in not only looking at the impact of house demolitions on both children and their parents, but also in going on to relate the accumulative impact on the family unit (in terms of its mental, physical and economic health and access to familial and wider social support) to the responsibilities of duty bearers to protect and assist.

Based on its findings, the study recommends that all stakeholders—Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the international community and donor governments—act immediately to respond to house demolitions within the OPT.

Stakeholders would achieve this by fulfilling their obligations to protect children and their families according to international humanitarian and international human rights law, in particular the Convention of the Rights of the Child and the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.

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