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Palestinians Abandon Yanun Village, Citing Attacks By Israeli Settlers

Bara, 6, forced out of his home by people who do not have any right to be there, according to international law

RAMALLAH, October 19 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Six Palestinian families set out Friday October 18, from the West Bank village of Hirbat Yanun, leaving it completely abandoned.

Once home to 25 families, members of the Sobih clan said they were fleeing after four years of worsening attacks by Jewish settlers who set up (illegal) settlement outposts on nearby hilltops, reported the Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper on its website Saturday, October 19.

The settlers' attacks have become increasingly frequent in recent months, they complained.

Groups of masked Jewish settlers have charged into the village, coming at night with dogs and horses, stealing sheep, hurling stones through windows and beating the men with fists and rifle butts, Palestinian residents told the Associated Press.

An electricity generator was scorched by fire, knocking out power to the village, they said.

Three large water tanks were tipped over and emptied, added the Palestinians.

Palestinians complain bitterly of land lost over the past decades of Mideast conflict.

This is believed to be the first time recently that Palestinians abandoned an entire village due to the conflict.

Confrontations between Jewish settlers and Palestinians often fall into a murky legal area, with the Israeli occupation army, the police and the military's civil administration in the occupied Palestinian territories all involved to varying degrees.

An Israeli army spokesman, who did not want his name used, said soldiers try to prevent conflict between settlers and Palestinians, but that forces are primarily in the area to protect Israeli settlers from attacks by Palestinian resistance activists.

Spokesmen for the Israeli police and the civil administration could not be reached on Friday evening, the beginning of the Jewish sabbath.

Phone calls to the Yesha Settler's Council, an umbrella group for the settlers, also went unanswered Friday.

Yanun is an isolated valley hamlet flanked by two (illegal) Jewish settlement outposts on nearby hilltops.

In Yanun, the men cried as they got into two cars to leave for the larger nearby village of Aqraba, where they believe there will be safety in numbers.

They'll live with relatives there or move into rented apartments.

"Death would be easier than leaving," Kamal Sobih said, describing his attachment to the land where generations of his family have lived.

"But there is no choice." He said he often spent nights keeping watch for attackers from his windows.

Ahmed Sobih, an elderly man, sat in the back seat of the one of the cars, an Arab head scarf covering his right eye.

He said he lost sight in the eye after a beating from an Israeli settler.

He had been tending sheep on the hillside when a stranger approached.

Sobih,mistaking the man for someone from a neighboring Arab village, went to shake hands with the man and offer him a cigarette but was beaten with his own walking stick, he said.

The village chief, Abdelatif Sobih, was the last to go.

He said he's been attacked seven times and that his wife Raideh threatened to leave him if they didn't abandon the place.

"I kept urging the people not to leave, but they did, one by one," he said, crying.

"They left me without a choice. I'm blaming my people as well (as the settlers) because they left me alone."

About 200 (illegal) Jewish settlements were set up in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since Israel occupied the Palestinian territories in the 1967 aggression against its Arab neighbors.

All the settlements, according to U.N. resolutions, are considered illegal. Some 60 so-called "rogue" outposts, often just a cluster of caravans, have popped up in recent years.

According to a report issued Sunday, June 30, by Israeli peace group “Peace Now”, ever since Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came into power in February 2001, Jewish settlers in the West Bank have built 44 new sites.

“Nine of these new sites were erected in the period March-June 2002," the Peace Now report said.

It added that "the term 'outposts' is misleading. To all intents and purposes, these sites are new settlements: they have independent infrastructures and are spread over new pieces of land."

Peace Now spokesman Tzali Reshef said in a statement that the Israeli government "is systematically violating its commitment to the Israeli public as written in the coalition agreement that formed the basis for the national unity government."

"The creation of new settlements harms Israel's security and unnecessarily endangers still more [Israeli] soldiers and citizens," he added.

For more than thirty years, the creation of Jewish settlements has been a central component of Israel's effort to consolidate control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.

Israeli settlement construction has served not only to facilitate territorial acquisition and to justify the continuing presence of Israeli armed forces on Palestinian lands, but also to limit the territorial contiguity of areas populated by Palestinians and thereby to preclude the establishment of a viable independent Palestinian state.

Israel's settlement policy and practices clearly contravene international law.

Article 49, paragraph 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that "the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territories it occupies."

Moreover, the confiscation of land for settlement construction violates the rules contained in the 1907 Hague Regulations protecting public and private property in occupied territory.

Settlement activity is also fundamentally incompatible with the concept of a "just and lasting peace" called for in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242.

In Resolution 465, which was unanimously adopted, the Security Council made clear that "Israel's policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants" in the occupied territories not only violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, but also constitute "a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East."

The Security Council called upon Israel to "dismantle the existing settlements and in particular to cease, on an urgent basis, the establishment, construction of planning of settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem."

A detailed new map of the West Bank published Monday, May 13, 2002, shows that Israeli settlers exert control over nearly half of Palestinian territories through a strategic placement of a few Jewish settlements.

The study, released by the B'Tselem center for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, was based on previously unpublished documents collected from Israeli municipal officials over the past nine months.

It shows that the Jewish settlements themselves occupy 1.7 percent of the West Bank territory.

In a study released on July 24 by Peace Now, most Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories said that they would quit Israeli settlements if the government ordered them out and offered financial compensation.

The survey found that 68% of settlers "recognize the authority of the democratic institutions of the country to decide on a withdrawal from the settlements and will conform to such a decision."

The survey, unprecedented in its scope and depth, was supervised by an academic committee of professors from Tel Aviv University and conducted by the Hopp Research company on 3,200 households, in every settlement numbering 150 inhabitants and in most of the smaller ones.

Peace Now stressed that the level of willingness to leave among the people surveyed suggests that settlements are not immovable and that the main obstacle to peace is hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government.

"The settlers, with the exception of a very small extremist minority, will not be an obstacle to a peace agreement," Peace Now said, adding that views expressed by the Council of Settlers were not representative.