by Saed Bannoura A group of Israeli settler youth standing on a hillside near the Palestinian village of Beit Ummar got Israeli soldiers stationed nearby to prevent a group of Palestinian farmers, accompanied by international and Israeli human rights activists, from accessing their farmland.
Soldier ordering Palestinian farmer to leave his land (Ma'an photo)
The farmers, residents of the village of Beit Ummar, near Hebron in the southern West Bank, own farmland near the illegal Israeli settlement of Bet Ayin, which was constructed on illegally-confiscated Palestinian land.
The settlement continues to expand further and further onto Palestinian land, and the Palestinian farmers whose land lies nearby the expanding settlement have experienced increasing harassment over the last several months.
As the children stood on the hillside chanting “Death to all Arabs”, the Israeli soldiers showed the farmers and human rights observers a military order declaring their farmland to be a “closed military zone”, and forced them off their land at gunpoint.
This incident comes on the heels of a violent attack by a gang of masked Israeli settlers against two elderly Palestinian farmers, who were badly beaten on April 26th. One of them, Abdullah Soleiby, age 80, suffered severe head injuries when 30 Israeli soldiers held him down and hit him on the head with rocks.
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