On Thursday 30 June at 11:00 AM, the villagers of Burin reported that a fire was started by a group of settlers in one of the village´s crop field in the hills.
According to a villager who witnessed the events, Walid M. N. noted that before the fire began to burn, approximately 50 settlers from the illegal settlement of Yitzhar, including some children, were seen atop the hill which is just situated in the southwest portion of the village.
ISM was told that many villagers went up to the blaze to try to stop it, but the Nablus Fire Department had to be called afterwards to put the fire out.
When ISM went to see where the attack had taken place, a jeep of Israeli soldiers could be seen watching the area.
Burin is located in the southwest of Nablus. It has a population of approximately 4000 inhabitants. The villagers have been suffering from regular settler attacks for many years.
After a recent burning of its mosque, a group of extremist Israeli settlers torched on Friday Palestinian farmlands planted with wheat in the Al Mogheer village, north of the central west bank city of Ramallah.
The settlers burnt the land in broad daylight and the fires consumed most of the 35 Dunams of land planted with wheat until the villagers managed to control the fire.
Representatives of the Palestinian and Israeli District Coordination offices arrived at the scene after the attack, and the Israeli army claimed it would be investigating it.
Two weeks ago, settlers broke into the village mosque and set it ablaze.
In February this year, settlers uprooted 150 wheat planted Dunams that belong to Al Mogheer residents.
The settlers also uprooted 150 Dunams of farmlands that belong to residents of Tormos-Ayya village, near Ramallah, and sprayed the lands in question with chemicals.
10 June 2011| Popular Struggle Coordination Committee
The village of Biddu held a demonstration this week demanding access to their farmlands and a end to the Separation Wall in their village. In 2004, four demonstrators were shot dead by live ammunition in a similar demonstration.
Roughly 50 people gathered near an Israeli placed gate at the edge of the agricultural lands of Biddu on Friday for an unarmed demonstration. Quickly the demonstration turn into chaos as Palestinian youth threw rocks and the Israeli army responded with tear gas and stun grenades. No injuries were reported in the course of the demonstration, which lasted for several hours. In 2004, four unarmed demonstrators were shot dead in Biddu by live fire from Israeli soldiers. In recent years, demonstrations in the village have been all but non-existent.
Military experts say unidentified devices found in West Bank may have contained outlawed white phosphorus.
The Israeli army has been accused of leaving dangerous munitions near Palestinian homes after two boys were seriously burnt when they picked up a mysterious silver canister which exuded toxic white fumes.
A second canister, discovered nearby less than a week later, was destroyed by the army in a controlled explosion
The army does not deny leaving the devices, but would not identify them and suggested they were left over after training exercises. But the area where they were found does not feature on an army map of designated training areas and the canisters appeared new and unweathered.
Eid Da’ajani, 15, found the canister on 20 February, around 100 metres from his home in the village of Buweib, south of Hebron. The device, around 20cm (7.9 ins) long and 5cm in diameter, was lying in a scrubland where the boys were watching the family’s goats.
Eid showed it to his cousin, Mohammed, also 15, who said that it might be a bomb, but Eid picked at the tube’s foil-like covering, causing it to emit dense white fumes. The boys ran away but the gas clung to them and burnt their clothes, melting their shoes and burning their skin.
“The moment the smoke came. I dropped it, but the smoke followed us. When we escaped that’s when the pain started, ” said Eid.
Military experts consulted by the Guardian said the effect of the smoke was similar to that caused by white phosphorous but could not speculate on the nature of the devices from photographs alone.
One suggested that it could be chaff – projectiles fired from an aircraft to decoy enemy missiles – which had not ignited.
The use of white phosphorous in civilian areas is banned by the Geneva conventions yet it is often used by armies for marking and creating smoke screens. Israel used white phosphorous in civilian areas during the Gaza war in 2008-2009 but stopped after international criticism.
Khalid Da’ajani, the boys’ grandfather said that 10 people in the area had been killed by discarded army bombs. “We knew it was the army [which left the cannister] but we had never seen anything like this. The burns seemed to spread along their bodies and all we could do was pour water on them which didn’t seem to help,” he said.
Both boys were taken to the local hospital in Yatta, but when contacted by Eid’s father the Israeli army showed little interest until told that there had been an explosion. Soldiers then questioned the boys and doctors eventually gave them an intravenous transfusion which eased their pain. The family’s request to receive treatment in an Israeli hospital was denied, but two days later, the boys were taken to hospital in Hebron where a team of visiting Italian doctors spent three hours cleaning their wounds.
The hospital report states that boys suffered first to second degree burns to their faces, hands, ankles and legs due to “the explosion of a foreign body”. They were then referred to a burns unit in Nablus, around 60 miles from their home, rather than to an Israeli hospital less than half the distance away.
But last week, Lo’ai, Mohammed’s younger brother discovered an identical canister not far from where the first was found.
He ran away and his family contacted the army. After inspecting the device, troops piled rocks and explosives around it before blowing it up.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Israeli army said: “The area under discussion served in the past as a training field and is no longer in use. The young men were treated on site by a military medical team. Because their injuries were light, they did not require evacuation to an Israeli hospital, and they were evacuated by the Red Crescent.”
Almost two weeks after the event the boys have stopped vomiting and suffering from headaches. Large parts of their skin remain bleached white and blistered. Both seem to be recovering but still find it hard to walk.
A spokesman for Physicians for Human Rights and Israeli non-governmental organisation said that the incident represented a violation of the Palestinians’ right to the health by the Israeli army.
“Leaving bombs unattended on the lands of Palestinians where children and others spend most of their time is a violation of human rights. Worse, is the fact that the army denied these children a better treatment in Israeli hospitals despite the fact that they admitted it was a bomb they had left in the field,” the spokesman said.
Physicians for Human Rights have said that they have written to ask the army for answers about the incident and will take legal action with the family if the army does not explain how two of these dangerous devices appeared in village lands that are regularly frequented by children, adults and animals.
On the morning of Wednesday May 18th, Mohammed, arrived at his farm to find the roof of his farm buildings had been removed and the materials taken away from the property during the night. The farm is situated directly between Etzion settlement and a military police base, South of Bethlehem. The farm has been in Mohammed’s family for generations. He and his brothers grow grapes on the land, and stay in the farm house at weekends and during the summer when the children don’t need to go to school. A significant part of the farm land has previously been confiscated and part of it is now prohibited from being planted as it is close to the base.
There have been previous attacks on the farm with fertilizer and dead dogs dropped into the water source. Following this incident the well needed to be cleaned out and the water replaced. The family have been to the courts and have been given 10 days to replace the roof, otherwise it is viewed by the authorities as a new build, for which the rules are highly restrictive. Work is underway.
