“Illegal” Palestinian Homes Demolished

Here is a news report about some Palestinians who had their homes demolished on the pretext that they had been built illegally. This kind of thing happens all the time in Jerusalem, where new homes for Jewish Israelis are built all the time but Palestinians find themselves mysteriously unable to obtain planning permission. If they go ahead and build anyway then sooner or later the Israeli authorities show up with bulldozers.

The odd thing here is that these demolished homes are not in Jerusalem or in some other area under direct Israeli occupation, but rather in Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. The homes were demolished by security forces working for the Hamas government that administers Gaza, on the basis that the land was government owned. That some of the people whose shacks were destroyed had previously been made homeless by Israel’s invasion in January 2009 seems not to have moved the Hamas cadres.

This is of course incredibly ironic, and not in a good way.