Monday, July 15, 2013

Another Attack on the Jaber Family by Israeli Settlers

Submitted by Rod Driver Salem-News.com-Jul-14-2013

The settlers' goal is to terrorize the Palestinians to leave their land, which would then be grabbed up by settlers in the name of the state of Israel.

Settlers damaging Jaber`s garden

(OCCUPIED PALESTINE) - For three hours on Friday, July 12, from 11 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon, dozens of settlers from Kiryat Arba invaded the land and gardens of the Jaber family – Atta, Rudina and their three children – in al-Baqaa, near Hebron. Accompanied by the Israeli police and led by Malachi Levinger, the son of the violent settlement pioneer Moshe Levinger who himself has been implicated in many attacks on families in the al-Baqaa area, they uprooted his plants and replaced them with their own.

This is not the first time the Jaber family has been terrorized by settlers from Kiryat Arba, who claim his land and that of his neighbors. The family, which had lived on its land for the past 600-700 years, had 400 dunams of agricultural land (100 acres) before the Israeli Occupation of 1967. Since then they have lost almost all of it, being left with just 60 dunams, and most of that within the Kiryat Arba settlement and thus off-limits to them.

Over the year they have had their vineyards ripped out and their irrigation systems destroyed; indeed, the entire al-Baqaa, a rich grape- and olive-growing valley, is being dried up by Israel’s refusal to supply it with water or even allow the Palestinian farmers to dig wells or reservoirs for the collection of rainwater. (Kiryat Arba’s Olympic-size swimming pool is visible from the Jaber home.)