Palestinian family in cave home face Israeli eviction

Farasin, Palestinian Territories: Ahmed Amarneh’s home, with a wooden door opening onto cushion-lined rooms, is not the first Palestinian residence in the occupied West Bank to receive a demolition notice from Israel.

But it may be the first built inside a cave which the Jewish state has threatened to destroy. Amarneh, a 30-year-old civil engineer, lives with his family in the northern West Bank village of Farasin, where Israel insists it must approve any new residential construction and can tear down homes built without permits.

"I tried twice to build (a house), but the occupation authorities told me it was forbidden to build in the area," Amarneh told AFP, using a term for Israel used by some Palestinians. The Oslo peace accords of the 1990s gave the Palestinians self-rule in parts of the West Bank.

However, some 60 percent of the territory dubbed Area C, where Farasin is located, remains under full Israeli civil and military control. The United Nations considers Area C as occupied Palestinian Territory.

But Israel has increasingly allocated land there for construction of Jewish settlements -- communities considered illegal under international law. Convinced he would never get Israeli approval to build a home in his village, Amarneh set his sights on a cave in the foothills overlooking Farasin.

Amarneh said he figured that as an ancient, natural formation, Israel could not possibly argue that the cave was illegally built, while the Palestinian Authority (PA) agreed to register the land in his name. Amarneh, whose handyman skills are considerable, sealed the entrance to the cave with a stone wall and installed a wooden door at its centre.