The Palestinian villagers settled there several decades ago, after Israel expelled them from the Arad desert, and purchased the land from residents in the Palestinian village of Yatta.[5]
To the left: the rubble of the home of a widow with 9 children, Israeli troops demolished her house on the 25th of January 2012. In the middle: the tinshack she now has to live in with her children in Umm al-Khair.
Human rights activists and reporters have criticized the lack of amenities for the villagers while settlers nearby enjoy modern life. According to Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, in 2010, Carmel is
'a lovely green oasis that looks like an American suburb. It has lush gardens, kids riding bikes and air-conditioned homes. It also has a gleaming, electrified poultry barn that it runs as a business.' Beyond its barbed wire fencing, the Bedouins of Umm al-Kheir in shanties are denied connection to the electricity grid, barns for their livestock and toilets, and all attempts to build permanent dwellings are demolished. Elad Orian, an Israeli human rights activist, noted that the chickens of Carmel's poultry farm get more electricity and water than the Palestinian Bedouin nearby.[7]
Children's park in Umm al-Khair
Hammerman writes as follows in 2011:
Right next to the stately country homes - complete with air-conditioning, drip-irrigation gardens and goldfish ponds - a few extended families including old men, old women and infants live in dwellings made of tin, cloth and plastic siding, though there are a few cinder-block structures, too. They tread on broken, barren ground. They have no running water. They are not connected to the power grid that lights up every settlement and outpost in this remote region. They have no access road.[5]
David Dean Shulman has taken down the account of one of the villagers, a young man named ‘Id al-Hajalin, who after outlining their difficulties, showed two documents, a receipt for taxes he paid on his land, and another, an order from the Military Authorities to demolish his home. He commented:
“Why do they want to destroy my house? Where can I go? Can I go to America? I have nothing, and they want to take that nothing from me. Can you help me? Where am I supposed to go?”[2]
Cultivated land in Umm al-Khair
Umm al-Khair was one of the main subjects of the 2016 book The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine by Ben Ehrenreich.[8]
Umm al-Khair is also the base community for the Good Shepherd Collective, a grassroots organization resisting the intrusive colonization of local land by Israeli settlers.[citation needed]
In June 2024, a third of the village still standing was demolished as the IDF bulldozed 11 houses, including 5 tent residences, leaving 50 shepherds homeless. They also destroyed electricity generator, solar cells and water tanks.[9]
Umm al-Khair activist Awdah Hathaleen with his son Watan
↑ David Shulman, 'Truth and Lies in South Hebron'Archived 2018-11-03 at the Wayback Machine , Jewish Quarterly 18 June 2013.'Um al-Khair, a ramshackle collection of tents and huts and simple stone houses and sheep-pens and corrugated shacks that borders, tragically, on the settlement of Carmel in the South Hebron hills. Or rather, historically, Carmel borders on Um al-Khair, since the lands appropriated for the settlement in the early 80s all belonged to the Bedouin goat-herders and farmers who live on this rocky hill..'
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