After many years of continuous suffering, after hundreds of systematic attacks, dozens of demolitions, and all the violent attempts to expel and displace us from our land in Umm al-Khair, we are now facing a new chapter, albeit a strange one: the settlers are attempting to kill the dreams of our children.

It is no secret to anyone that Umm al-Khair has been subjected to decades of attempts to uproot us, its inhabitants. The methods have been varied, but always systematic and deliberate, the goal always singular and clear: to expand the settlement of Carmel at the expense of the lands of Umm al-Khair. As if we do not own this land, have no history in it, and no right to survive on it. As if the outposts established by the settlers have the right to exist while Umm al-Khair does not.

Recently, this expansionism has extended to target a small children's football pitch, no more than half a dunam in size, that has been a dream of the children of Umm al-Khair for decades. 

This football pitch was my husband Awdah’s vision. He wanted to build something for the children, as he saw how they were suffering for many years, the terror they live in, surrounded by the settlers and the army. We have Umm al-Khair here, the settlement there, and his idea was to let the children have a space of play and resistance in between. 

When you see the kids playing there, I say thank God, and in my heart I thank Awdah too. Even our 9-month-old baby Kinan is crawling on the football pitch, taking his first steps there. 

Six months ago, on 28 June 2025, Awdah was killed in this very place by an Israeli settler, before his and the children’s dream was able to take shape. The murder happened on this selfsame piece of land, and the pitch is named in his memory. It is so important to me that this piece of land is not demolished. If anything were to happen to it, it would be as if they had killed him for the second time.

For this pitch has provoked one of the fiercest campaigns led by the extremist settler organisation and lobby group, Regavim – turning a simple dream into a nightmare. 

It’s as if the children of Umm al-Khair should not rejoice, should have no right to dream, nor to feel even once that they are simply children. 

It is laughable that a child's dream has led to a group of adults composing a letter to the Israeli defence minister, believing that a playground would become, according to Regavim, an "invasion" and a "security threat" to the settlement of Carmel.

According to this inverted narrative, the children's football pitch has become a grave violation of the law, and a real danger to the security of the settlers, and specifically to the new illegal outpost established by the settlers inside the lands of Umm al-Khair.

The settlers’ modern outpost is treated as legal, while Umm al-Khair, a community more than 70 years old, is treated as criminal. 

Regavim’s hostility and incitement against the field has not stopped at media campaigns; they quickly translated this into action on the ground. Settlers backed by occupation forces were trying to storm the field even before the pitch’s grass had been laid, and the children had had a chance to kick a single ball on it. 

When Israeli police and civil administration acknowledged the legality of the pitch’s construction, settlers simply retaliated by appropriating another section of private Palestinian land just metres away – carving out a road between the outpost and the rest of Carmel, straight through the middle of the village. 

At the same time, they positioned a series of large rocks to block the only road used by Umm al-Khair’s residents. As a final act of intimidation, they draped the new football pitch with dozens of Israeli flags and symbols. 

We contacted the Israeli police dozens of times, but they did not arrive for nearly two hours. Two full hours of distress calls, and when they finally did arrive, the police only listened to the settlers' narrative, as if they were the ones who had called the police and not, us, the Palestinian landowners. 

The Israeli civil administration forces eventually turned up and once again acknowledged the illegality of what the settlers were doing. However, as we’ve come to expect in this current reality, and in light of the state’s blatant complicity, the settlers’ new road that was acknowledged as illegal, has remained – just as the many dozens of dunams previously seized by the settlers have never been returned to the Palestinian landowners.

Then came the decision we feared. On the afternoon of 10 February, the Israeli civil administration came to Umm al-Khair once again: not to remove the illegal road, not to dismantle the illegal outpost, not to take down the flags, but to hand us a demolition order for the pitch. 

International laws guarantee children the right to play and access to joy, and these rights must be granted to all children around the world without discrimination. So why are the children of Umm al-Khair deprived of them? Isn't it enough that they are deprived of the right to security and the right to live freely? Or should the fate of dozens of children be dictated by a racist settler institution like Regavim, which is fighting to erase their existence in the first place?

In Umm al-Khair, the state’s violence is not only aimed at the stone, but also at the dream… even the dreams of children are not spared.▼