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Friday, July 18, 2008
In the West Bank, rockets reverse direction.
Homemade rockets were launched toward an unsuspecting civilian population. Residents worried about their safety and a dangerous escalation to the conflict.
This would be a familiar storyline if not for the alleged perpetrators, Israelis, and the victims, Palestinians.
Israeli police this week arrested Gilad Herman, a religious student at the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar, in connection with the rocket attacks. Residents of the Palestinian village of Burin, which lies in a wide valley ringed by Jewish settlements, said two rockets were fired from Yitzhar, and another from the settlement of Bracha. No one was injured in the attacks.
According to Israeli media reports, the rockets resembled the so-called Qassam rockets that Palestinians once fired with frequency from Gaza, before a cease-fire began a month ago.
“Soon, when we go collecting our olives, we will be scared they will shoot rockets on us,” village resident Munir Qadous told me Thursday.
Residents of Yitzhar told Israeli media this week that the rocket attack did not reflect their community.
Palestinians told a different story. Qadous said settlers recently shot at him as he herded his brother’s sheep on village land. He reported the incident on Thursday to the nearby Israeli army district headquarters.
A woman from the village also complained to the army on Thursday of poisoned sheep. Dozens of sheep in the village have died in recent months. A village veterinarian has determined poison to be the cause of death.
Last month, on a Thursday afternoon, settlers burned 75 to 100 acres of mostly olive trees on the outskirts of the village, residents said. Qadous lost 4.5 acres, more than half his land. Resident threw stones at the fire-setters, to no avail.
Burin villagers also visited the army to complain. “This is doing nothing for us. Even after these complaints, they have attacked us again,” Qadous said.
In a report issued last week, the Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, found that 91 percent of reported crimes perpetrated by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank went unsolved.