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Picture of a settlement


Kadim settlement, one the settlement being removed from the Jenin area in order to concentrate Israeli control in Jerusalem and Sulfit area.

by Devon
August 15

This picture is just after sunrise on the morning of the disengagement. The illegal Kadim settlement is a quarter of a mile away from the tiny West Bank hamlet of Kherbet Rannam, population 35 people; thats 6 families. The whole village descends from one man who fled Haifa in 1948. He lost around 2,000 dunams of land there and bought 210 dunams in Kherbet Rannam.

ISM was called there because on the night of Aug. 13 around a 100 settlers tried to enter the village, but were stopped by the army. Nevertheless, the children couldn’t sleep because they were so frightened. We arrived the next day and were greeted by the villagers. All was quiet except for the occasional round of of military gunfire in the late afternoon. Nobody was hurt.

On August 15, when I was coming home, I first stopped at the Palestinian Authority department of public works in Jenin. We saw bullet holes in the wall above the main desk. We were told that the Israeli soldiers patrol Jenin all the time and the shootings happen all the time. The man also said that he had to dive to the ground in order to dodge the bullets.

On the way back to Bil’in, my taxi was stopped at Ball’a, outside of Jenin. All eight of us were ordered to get out in front of the two armored vehicles (tanks without guns). All the men were then ordered to lift up our shirts to check for bombs. They looked at our passports and questioned us intensely. One woman next to me accidently said Palestine and the soldier replied, “this is Israel, f##k Palestine.”

So you can see, this is a military fully committed to human rights and “disengagement.”