My family lived up the hill on the eastern end of the village, and we fled towards Yalu, but upon reaching that village we realized the Israeli army was already there and we could not enter. We ended up walking for sixteen hours to reach Ramallah, thirty-two kilometers away.
Expelled from Imwas at fourteen during the 1967 war, he describes his family's flight on foot to Ramallah before Israeli bulldozers razed the village and Canada Park was planted over its ruins.
Ahmad Abughoush was born around 1953 in Imwas — the village identified with biblical Emmaus, in the Latrun salient between Jerusalem and the coast. On 6 June 1967, the second day of the war, Israeli troops surrounded and entered the village; its defenders of 1948 had already lost its farmland, and now the whole population was ordered out and driven north toward Ramallah. Within days the army demolished Imwas along with the neighboring villages of Yalu and Beit Nuba. Thirteen elderly villagers who could not walk were never heard from again; in the mid-1970s the Jewish National Fund used donations from its Canadian branch to plant Canada Park over the ruins.
Abughoush, who later spent nearly eleven years in Israeli prisons for political activity, became president of the Imwas Society (Lajnet Ahali Imwas), which keeps the village’s memory alive and campaigns for return — including a project called “Rebuilding Imwas from Memory,” in which children and elders together reconstruct the village in plaster. He gave this account to BADIL’s Al-Majdal magazine.
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Quoted exactly as published by BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights (Al-Majdal). Visit the archive for the full testimony.
BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights (Al-Majdal)