Holy Land: CPT release film about school under threat of demolition
Christian Peacemaker Teams’ Palestine team has just released a new video about the Masafer Yatta area, featuring the Al-Fakheit School, an 'archway to the future.'
Although the twelve-minute production presents the realities that the people living in the region face - their homes under constant threat of home demolition, Israeli military exercises disrupting their lives - the film is surprisingly uplifting, filled with faces of the children and adults who live in the scattered villages around the school, and whose lives the school has greatly enhanced.
Before Al-Fakheit school was built in the area the Israeli military calls 'Firing Zone 918,' the children of the region had to live in Yatta during the school year or did not attend school at all. For many students, school is their primary leisure time of the day. They also receive services from the Palestinian Authority such as psychological counseling to deal with traumas they face as a result of living within the Firing Zone.
CPT’s Palestine team takes turns with Italian peace group Operation Dove and EAPPI accompanying a jeep donated by UNICEF and the Japanese government for transporting children to the school in the Firing Zone, because the Israeli military has confiscated the vehicles of other Nongovernmental Organizations working in the region. On 27 October, soldiers stopped the driver, beat him up, and forced him to drive the jeep over spikes so that he could not pick up the children.
See the film here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=45RQq3Maykg