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South Hebron Hills, al-Tuwani, Palestine CPTnet 18 March 2011 Al- Tuwani: Six olive trees destroyed in the night On the morning of 16 March 2011, residents of the Palestinian village of al-Tuwani discovered that someone had destroyed six of their olive trees in the night. The villagers said that the perpetrators were almost certainly Israeli settlers from the nearby outpost of Havat Ma`on. “Settlers did this...they did this because of the settlers who were murdered near Nablus,” said Fadil Ahmed Raba`i, referring to the recent murders of a settler family inside the northern West Bank settlement of Itamar. The trees were approximately fifteen years old and would have produced olives in the fall harvest had they not been damaged. They were the property of four residents of At-Tuwani: Suleiman Jibreen Raba`i, `Aisa Jibreen Raba`i, Mohammad Salaami Raba`i, and Musa Khalil Raba`i. Al-Tuwani has experienced frequent vandalism of olive groves since construction of the Ma`on Settlement in 1984. Most recently, on 21 February, Raba`i reported that three mature olive trees in his family`s grove had been damaged. Since the mid-1980s, Palestinians in Tuwani and the surrounding villages have faced frequent threats, acts of violence, and intimidation from settlers, but remain committed to nonviolent resistance. Because villagers in the region are dependent on dry-land subsistence farming, aggression resulting in damage to trees or crops or denial of access to agricultural lands constitutes a significant threat to the communities. Photos are available here. [Note: According to the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and numerous United Nations resolutions, all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are illegal. All settlements are illegal and considered both a crime against humanity and war crime under Israeli law.] http://www.cpt.org/cptnet/2011/03/18/tuwani-six-olive-trees-destroyed-night |
