Sharabati family
عائلة الشرباتي

Mufeet Sharabati and his family live on Shuhada street. He was born here. Part of the family used to live close to the Avraham Avinu settlement, but the army welded the front door shut while the family was still inside. They escaped two days later. In the current house, Mufeet gained the permission to build another kitchen, but the army arrested him when he tried to bring the materials to his home. At the military camp, a group of 35 soldiers in civilian clothes beat him unconscious. He was hospitalized for six months with a broken spine. The surgery was expensive and was made more difficult because Mufeet is on Israel’s blacklist.

His brother Zidane lost his eye when a settler hurled a rock at him, and he wears dentures from the time a group of soldiers knocked out his teeth on a military jeep. The family is attacked nearly every day. “Only my youngest son has not been attacked yet,” Mufeet says and points to the two-and-a-half year old boy. Two of the children were once playing in the yard when a group of young settlers entered and tried to kidnap the five-year-old son. A neighbor heard the screams and managed to rescue the boy. With Israeli permission, B’Tselem placed cameras on the house afterward, but the army invaded with a large dog and demanded they be taken down. The settlers did not want their harassments exposed, and Mufeet states that the main reason the family is targeted is because they try to document all the incidents. From the roof, the ten-year-old son filmed the killing of Faruq Seder. A settler saw the boy filming them and tried to shoot him from the street. Mufeet arrived at the scene, and a settler wanted to open fire at him but was deterred by the camera-wielding Palestinians. When a group of soldiers once attacked Zidane, the father saw it from the window and slipped on the stairs on his way down to the street. The ambulance could not arrive, and he died from a heart attack. “The occupation killed my father,” Zidane says.