Israeli forces demolish a Qalandia home and farm buildings near Nablus

The Jerusalem Governorate said Israeli forces pulled down a two-storey house in the al-Bariyat quarter of Qalandia, north of occupied Jerusalem, on Monday, leaving 15 people from two families without housing.

The house belonged to Thieb Hamad and ran to roughly 250 square metres on each of its floors. Israeli authorities gave the absence of a building permit as the reason for the order.

And in Beit Dajan, east of Nablus in the northern occupied West Bank, forces levelled a 100-square-metre home and two agricultural sheds belonging to Nader Raja Haj Mohammad, and filled in a well that had been used to collect water.

The well is the part of that morning's work that outlasts it. A demolished shed can be rebuilt from sheeting within a season, but land that has lost its stored water cannot be worked through the dry months, so the damage carries forward into the next planting rather than ending with the bulldozer.

The permit is the mechanism behind both orders, and its effect is a delay: a structure raised without one can be marked for removal long after it is finished, so the order tends to reach a house that is already lived in and a plot that is already planted.

The Wall and Colonization Resistance Commission, which keeps a monthly count, recorded 80 demolition operations across the occupied West Bank during July. Those hit 165 structures in all: 80 inhabited homes, 8 standing empty and 63 agricultural buildings.

The same count logged 34 further properties served with demolition notices but not yet touched, and 2,256 attacks over the month by Israeli forces and settlers on Palestinians, their land and their property.

Read against that monthly figure, Monday's two operations register less as an incident than as a rate. The 15 people displaced in Qalandia enter a tally that the commission has been keeping continuously, and the notices served in July mark the households the same tally is expected to reach next.