Ziyada also tells IPS that the settlement practices collective punishment in many ways to eradicate the villagers from their land. So the military came in and destroyed the houses.” A few months ago, destroyed three houses at the edge of the village because a settler complained to the military that he didn’t want to see Arab houses from his window. The Israeli military prohibits any villager to expand their home and build on the land. “We can’t build any more houses in the village. There used to be wildlife here, many different animals that would live in the forest. “This used to be a beautiful forest where we would go for picnics,” Ziyada tells IPS, pointing to a hill near her home. The Efrat settlement colony website states that “a garden city has blossomed in the Judean hills.” Yet one can see that large swaths of forest area and wilderness have been destroyed as the settlement grows, and settler-only roads cut the hillsides in half. “They started constructing the wall several months ago … and the settlement is growing every day.” Efrat settlement colony, part of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, currently houses approximately 9,000 settlers, including Israelis and immigrants from the US, Canada, South Africa, Britain and Russia. “We are now surrounded by the settlement of Efrat,” Suha Ziyada, 22, one of the 750 residents of Wadi Rahaal tells IPS. But this is not an isolated incident these days in the West Bank.Ī few kilometers east of the Cremisan convent and Bethlehem city, the small Palestinian village of Wadi Rahaal is facing extinction as a result of expanded Israeli settlement policy and the widening path of the wall. When this section of the wall is completed, several villages will be separated from each other and the greater Bethlehem area. Near the convent, the Israeli settlement colonies of Gilo and Har Gilo, behind the wall on Palestinian lands, continue to expand over the rocky hillsides. This section of forest is being razed, according to Israeli plans, to complete a section of the separation wall, which continues to carve the West Bank into pieces. (Haythem Othman/ MaanImages)īETHLEHEM, 16 August ( IPS) - Israeli forces began Wednesday to bulldoze hundreds of trees on land owned by a Catholic convent near the city of Beit Jala near Bethlehem. Israeli bulldozers destroy trees in al-Wallageh village for the construction of the wall near the West Bank city of Bethlehem, 15 August 2007. Nora Barrows-Friedman The Electronic Intifada 17 August 2007
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