The Occupation Military started to clear and destroy the lands in Budrus, West Ramallah this morning, chopping and uprooting tens of olive trees to make way for the Apartheid Wall. While the Occupation Military had tried to destroy the land yesterday, the people in the village stood in front of the bulldozers, resisting the destruction and stopping them from clearing the land. However, the Occupation Militaryâs response was to threaten that they would impose a curfew on the entire village of 1200 people until the building of the Wall in the village was completed.
***image2***At 5 oâclock this morning the Occupation bulldozers started destroying the land, whereas the people did not expect them to start until their usual time of 8:00 a.m. Further, the Occupation military prevented the people from reaching the land where the bulldozers were working, leading to confrontations between the people and the Occupation Military. The people threw themselves in front of the bulldozers to try and prevent them from uprooting the trees, but the soldiers fired teargas and rubber bullets at the people, injuring 7 people.
The olives that were uprooted belonged to Ahmed Abdel Rahman, from Budrus, who is supporting a family of 16 people, including his children, his sisters and his mother. The olives provided his only source of living since he has no work. Ahmed and his sisters tried to stop the bulldozers but the Occupation Military pulled them away, denying them access to their own land. If the Wallâs path is completed as projected, it will rip through all of Budrusâ fields from the northwest side to the southwest side of the village, leaving no land to the people of this community. The Wall is also threatening the school and the cemetery in the village. Already, the school built after 1967 in Budrus was demolished by the Israelis once. Now, the school built as its replacement is being threatened by the Israeli Occupation Forces and the construction of the Apartheid Wall. After Al Naqba in 1948, more than 70% of the villageâs lands were annexed or occupied and the people in Budrus are considered refugees. They will now be made refugees again.
Between 30-40% of the people in the village depend on working on the other side of the Green Line, while 60-70% work in Ramallah. The olive trees in the village are used almost entirely for domestic consumption. The Apartheid Wall will deny the people access to their olive trees, prevent them from reaching their work places, separate them from essential land used for grazing and leave them with nothing to live on. Although the Wall in the western villages of Ramallah is near the Green Line, it is still built inside the 1967 borders on Palestinian land and will lead to the confiscation of thousands of dunums1 of lands in this area. This comes is in addition to the fact that the Occupation Forces are planning to build another Wall through the eastern side of these villages, separating them not only from Ramallah City, but also the rest of the West Bank. The villages of Lubban al Gharbiye, Rantis, Shuqba, Shabtin, Ni’lin, Al Midya, Qibya, Budrus and Deir Qaddis will all be encircled by the Wall, separating the people from all sources of social and economic livelihood and in turn, forcibly expelling the people from these villages.
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