‘Birds are witnesses’: For a West Bank family, half a life in half a house

Tulkarem, occupied West Bank – In the heart of the occupied West Bank’s Tulkarem refugee camp, in the Hammam neighbourhood that is a frequent target of Israeli raids, stands the home of 36-year-old former police officer Akram Nassar and his two children.
The street leading to the house is littered with rubble, broken pipes and other debris, and sewage flows down its side.
Closer to the house, Akram’s two sons, five-year-old Rahim and four-year-old Bara, appear. Bara is in shorts and a T-shirt in the mild, mid-September weather.
They are visible from the street because the entire front wall – and a good chunk of the side wall – of their house is missing after Israeli raids tore them off.
Their exposed front room is barren – except for two red plastic chairs; a single grey armchair; an old computer monitor without its casing; and a black-framed mirror hanging on the damaged interior door.
The floor tiles are broken, there is dust and rubble everywhere.

The tiles on the two remaining walls offer a glimpse of what the house may have looked like and how it was cared for in the past.
On September 2, an Israeli soldier used a bulldozer to destroy the facade of Akram’s house, like several others on the street.
Akram’s barely standing house, with none of the privacy or protection the idea of home conjures, fits in with the devastated landscape of Tulkarem.
Since October 7, the Israeli military’s “counter-terror” raids have damaged or destroyed most dwellings and infrastructure in the refugee camp.
Every one of Tulkarem’s many narrow alleys is lined with houses and shops missing walls, doors or windows.
Many buildings are completely uninhabitable. Some families, like Akram’s, try to survive in the ruins of their homes, not knowing what the next raid will bring.
Akram appears in the front room, carrying two plastic buckets. He steps out with his two boys and they walk to the corner to fetch some water from a tank donated by the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee.
When they get back, Akram goes into the small kitchen to make some coffee, the smell of burning still lingers in the air and scorch marks are visible on the walls.
Coffee is a rare luxury they could still enjoy in their home, Akram says. “Coffee is easy to make, I can still prepare it in my destroyed kitchen,” he says.
“As for meals, we usually eat at my mother’s house, just … in the alley opposite our house.”
Akram and his wife separated three years ago, and he has kept the children.
As he brewed coffee on a single-burner electric stove, he reflects on the disarray around him.
“The occupation forces didn’t leave a single thing untouched,” he says.
They deliberately destroyed everything, even the simplest kitchen items, just to make sure we lose everything.”
He no longer cleans up the rubble or tries to fix broken walls, he says, as he assumes his house will take further damage in another raid soon.

As Akram speaks, Bara rummages through a pile of clothes and other ruined belongings, looking for something to play with.
After a while, he lets out a jubilant scream: “I found one of my toys!” and runs around holding a small, colourful stuffed cat made to be hung in a mobile over a cot or on a pram.
Holding on to the little handle on its head, Bara is excitedly waving the cat around.
“Rahim and Bara used to spend most of their time playing, but even their play has changed now,” Akram says.
“They lost most of their toys and belongings. They no longer have any colouring pencils or drawing notebooks.”
He points to two birds chirping in a cage hung on the wall. “These two birds are the only things left from their life before the devastation,” he says. “My children lost everything, except for these birds.”
As Akram sits down with his coffee, the children begin gathering bird feed from the floor, it was scattered around the house by Israeli soldiers during their latest raid.
“The birds survived, even though the house was filled with smoke after the side room was blown up,” Akram says. “They’re witnesses to the destruction of everything inside this house.”
That destruction has been wrought over repeated raids since a raid by Israeli forces in March.
“That day the army was destroying everything in the camp, and the sound of explosions kept getting closer,” Akram recounts.
He feared the army would detain all the men like it had done in Nur Shams camp a few days earlier, so he sneaked into his mother’s house with his children.
“Suddenly, the door to my mother’s house was blown open, and soldiers armed to the teeth stormed in. They immediately started breaking everything. They beat me, and then arrested me.”

Rahim, who had been listening to his father’s account closely, jumps to his feet. “They hit him with their guns and tied his hands,” he exclaims, reliving the scene of his father’s assault.
Akram’s arrest was the most difficult part of his entire experience, he says, because of the terror it inflicted on his children.
“The children clung on to me, screaming, ‘Let our father go!’ But the soldiers ignored their cries.”
The children tried to follow their father and the armed soldiers, but their grandmother held on to them and brought them back into the house.
Akram says he remained under arrest in a make-shift detention camp set up in a nearby field until the following day.
After his release, he could not get back home for another day, as the Israeli soldiers had surrounded the Tulkarem camp and were not letting anyone in.
Since that day, Akram has been taking the children to their grandmother’s house whenever there is a raid nearby.

His mother’s house has also been damaged, its contents and front door vandalised, but it is still in better condition than Akram’s.
Being near their grandmother comforts and calms the children, he adds.
While the raid in March was perhaps the most traumatic for his family, Akram’s home sustained the worst damage in September, during an Israeli raid – dubbed “Summer Camps” – on refugee camps in the north of the occupied West Bank, including Tulkarem.
It was then that an Israeli D9 bulldozer demolished the front wall of Akram’s home and levelled an entire room, leaving the house completely exposed.
Soldiers attacked everyone and everything they laid eyes on, he says, and razed several houses around their own.
“When the bulldozer reached our neighbourhood, we were at my mother’s house. The sound of the destruction and the machine felt like an earthquake shaking the camp,” he recounts.
As he does after every raid, he rushed home after when the situation calmed, only to see that most of the building had been reduced to rubble.
“Less than 10 days after that first demolition [on September 11], the army blew up another side room with an explosive, starting a fire that filled the entire house with smoke,” he adds.
Akram says the effect the raids had on his and his children’s lives is more than the destruction of their home.
The bus that used to transport his children to school can no longer reach their neighbourhood because the roads have been destroyed.
So now,  Akram has to walk them there every morning and afternoon, fearing for their safety due to the rough terrain and the ever-present risk of a sudden military raid.
He says it is also harder for the children to visit their mother, who, since their separation, lives in her family’s home in the Sualma neighbourhood, just five minutes away from their house.
“Raids heavily damaged their mother’s house, so it is not safe for them to stay there either,” he says, adding that there is also the risk posed by raids bulldozers.

As he speaks, Akram looks through a pile of clothes, covered in dust and partially scorched, to see if any of it is usable.
Eventually, he picks out a few items and puts them in a plastic bag. “Thank God,” he exclaims sarcastically “I found half a pair of pyjamas and two shirts.”
Given the constant threats and damage, Akram says, “I’ve stopped trying to repair or even clean the house entirely because, at any moment, the army could raid us again and set us back to square one.”
Akram could be forgiven for thinking of moving his family elsewhere but, he says, he has “no intention to leave”.
“We know the destruction will continue. Now, after each raid, I just remove some of the rubble. Most of the household items are ruined, and we’ve had to get rid of them.”
Akram says sleeping in his house these days is not much different from sleeping on the street, as large parts of the house have collapsed and the windows are destroyed.
Dust and dirt fill the air constantly, and there is no protection from insects or any other pest that might enter, especially with sewage flooding the streets outside.
For Akram, however, none of this can make him leave.
“If the army comes back and destroys more of my house, or even demolishes it completely, we will stay in our home. We will stay even if the whole thing collapses”.
Every day,  Akram and the children move between the living room, the corner where their birds are kept, and the destroyed entrance of their home, trying to live a somewhat normal life in the ruins of their old one.
As they move around, they occasionally stop to greet their neighbours through the gaps that were once their walls.
“Nothing about our lives is normal any more,” he told me.
“But we will stay here, even if we have to live half a life, in half a house”.