Palestinian Primary School to be demolished

Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, Stop the Wall

On the Thursday, the 17th of October the Israeli Occupation Forces issued a demolition order for Fasayil’s primary school and yet another Palestinian family’s home in the village. Construction work requires a permit from the Occupation authorities but since the occupation of the West Bank in 1967 not one has been granted. The systematic ban on destruction is clearly aiming at driving out Palestinians of the Jordan Valley.

According to the demolition order issued against the primary school the community has to dismantle the school within 40 days or to face the arrival of the Occupation’s bulldozer and a heavy fine for not respecting the construction ban.

This summer, the Popular Committee of Fasayil together with the Palestinian Save the Jordan Valley Initiative of the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign and the Brighton Tubas Friendship and Solidarity Group, started to build the first and only primary school in Fasayil in the heart of the Jordan Valley. The grassroots project is part of the twinning between community groups in Brighton and in Palestine.

A picture for Fasayil school, staff and students. The first school to be built since 40 years of the Jordan Valley occupation, will be bulldozed on 29 November 2007.

In defiance of the Israeli Occupation’s complete ban on house construction, the shell of the new school has been completed in September. The school was built with ancient building techniques out of traditional mud bricks and will provide a resource for more than 115 children. It aims at resolving the grave educational crisis that is affecting Fasayil and many other communities in the Jordan Valley caused by military restrictions imposed by the occupation forces.

Villagers and local activists are defiant:

“They can knock our school down as often as they want. We cannot stop them from doing so. We will build the school again and again and again. They cannot destroy our determination to give proper education to our children.
Our children’s education is our future! They will not succeed in their attempts to drive us from our land.”

Education is a crucial tool for empowering Palestinian children to confront the harsh life under occupation, opening a perspective that goes beyond a future as slave labourers in the Occupation’s settlement plantations.

We, the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, are calling on all people around the world, the media and the international community to get active to prevent the Occupation from destroying Fasayil’s primary school, to defend the children’s right to education and to protect the Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley.

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