Settlers take another mountain top, soldiers follow, and Palestinians demonstrate for their rights


November 14, 2018
JFJFP
A familiar invasion

The village of Ras Karkar

Yumna Patel writes in Mondoweiss:

It was the day before Eid al-Adha last summer, and millions of Palestinian Muslims across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Israel were preparing for the biggest holiday of the year.

But when the residents of the Ramallah-area village of Kafr Ni’ma woke up, expecting to spend the day decorating their homes and preparing sweets for the visitors they would receive the following morning, they were shocked to find a group of visitors on the outskirts of the town.

“The settlers came in the middle of the night, no one knew. By morning they had paved a road up to the mountain, set up their tents, and had soldiers protecting them,” Zafer Attayah, a resident of Kfar Ni’ma told Mondoweiss.

Attayah pointed to the top of Risan mountain, located just 500 meters northeast of the village. “You can see now they have set up a caravan, and there are some soldiers around them,” he said.

The family of settlers, which Attayah estimates numbers around 10, first showed up on Risan mountain on September 7th. “Every day since then, the soldiers have been present in the area. Day and night they are there,” Attayah said.

The Risan mountain is nestled between three villages northwest of Ramallah, just a few kilometers from the Green Line — Kafr Ni’ma, Ras Karkar, and Kharbetha Bani Hareth. “People from all three villages own land on the mountain,” Attayah said, noting that his family is among the landowners. “After the settlers came, the Israeli occupation authorities told us that they were confiscating the land for the settlers,” he said. “They want to take 1,000 dunums [about 250 acres] of our land.”

Ever since the settlers showed up two months ago, the Palestinians from Risan’s three surrounding villages have been staging weekly Friday protests on the mountain in attempts to stop the confiscation. “We have to maintain our presence in the area,” Attayah said. “They think they can just come and take the land, but we will not make it easy for them.”

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