ISRAELI COWARDS ATTACK CHILDREN WITH FIRE!

Ramallah, June 25, 2014—At 2 am on Nov. 14, 2013, Ruwaida Dar Khalil was warming a bottle for her baby son when she heard the screech of car tires outside her home in Sinjil in the occupied West Bank. She dismissed the noise as teenagers fooling around in their cars, and went back to feeding her son. The next thing she heard was the sound of her front door being kicked in. 

Four adult male Israeli settlers were breaking into the tiny house that Ruwaida shares with her husband and five children. The men smashed windows with crowbars, before dousing the entrance in gasoline and setting it ablaze.

"[The fire] lit so quickly and spread fast," Ruwaida told Defense for Children International Palestine. Smoke began filling the kitchen and Ruwaida realized that she had to get her family out.

"I woke up my husband and kids … [my children] were so scared, terrified … they were crying," she said.

With the only escape route ablaze, Ruwaida and her husband, Khaled, had no option but to hide on the roof until help arrived. 

Khaled and Ruwaida had left the United States to return to the West Bank with high hopes of raising their children in their homeland. They never anticipated that their home would be the target of four settler attacks.

Sinjil, the village they now live in with their three daughters and two sons, sits northeast of Ramallah. It is surrounded on three sides by an Israeli military base and two settlements. Soldiers are a common sight in the neighborhood, and Ruwaida finds it hard to understand why they didn’t come to help her family on the night of the attack.

"That night, there were Israeli police officers on the corner… and soldiers usually come to our place every night," she said. "But… nobody showed up. Nobody cared."

"Why didn’t anybody come to protect innocent children in this house?"