To this day, the residents of both villages remain displaced. There have been recent initiatives in both Iqrit and Kufr Birim to practice return and temporarily reside in their villages. “My name is Nahida Zahra, and I am a second generation refugee from Kufr Birim. [Kufr Birim] was occupied in 29 October 1948, and in 7 November 1948 the Israeli occupation started a c‎ ensus of the inhabitants. They told the residents that they had to leave the village for only two weeks, but our families were never allowed to return there. The inhabitants moved to the [previously depopulated] village of al-Jish, but the houses were not enough for all of them, and some were relocated to the Lebanese village of al-Rmaish.99 Some families were separated from each other. For us, the Nakba became a double Nakba. Some ‎tried to return to the village, but the Israeli soldiers were always shooting at them. Ziad Ghantous [a resident] was killed on his way back to the village. T ‎ he Israelis used to scare people to prevent them from exercising their right of return. One of the techniques they used ‎was to drop bombs around the village. One time, one of the bombs dropped in front of a house, opening up a hole to an underground well. When two girls ran out of the house to see what was going on, they fell into the well. Later, their family found them drowned in the well. [On 21 January 1949] our families obtained permits to repair our houses. To do so, they allowed us to use only mud. [A month later] two military vehicles came and arrested ‎around 65 people from the village and sent them to Jenin. There, the Jordanian soldiers started to ‎shoot at them thinking they were Israelis, while the Israelis soldiers were shooting at them from the other side. ‎They started to shout “We are Palestinian!’ to stop them from shooting. After being displaced, they lived in a camp near Jenin, then they were transferred to [a camp in] Nablus until we collected enough money and sent someone to ‎bring them back. After a long trip, they tried to return again to Kufr Birim, but they were prevented by the Israelis. Thus, they went back to al-Jish. ‎ After the displacement, my family, the priests, the Mokhtar, and other inhabitants established a committee, which was in charge of reporting any changes that were made on the land of Kufr Birim. But every complaint that the committee sent to the courts were simply ignored. In 1972, our families organized a symbolic return that lasted one and a half years. At that time, I was 10 years old, and I remember how all the families gathered and took turns patrolling the village, ‎sharing tasks between each 99 It should be noted that the original Israeli plan was to relocate to Lebanon the whole population of Kufr Birim. This and other testimonies cite a “high commander” that ordered the villagers to move five kilometers to the North, while the Lebanese border is only four kilometers from the village. For more information, see BADIL, Returning to Kafr Bir’im, October 2006, 25, available at: http://www. badil.org/phocadownloadpap/Badil_docs/publications/Birim-en.pdf 36