Affrontements en Cisjordanie – 21 septembre 2011

Village clashes a stone’s throw away

nzherald.co.nz

Thursday Sep 22, 2011

Through the middle of the acrid clouds of eye-stinging, throat-burning tear gas we were trying to escape – one canister fired by the armed border police landing behind and another in front of us – it was hard not to reflect that the force the military was applying during this incident was not being directed at those who started it.

The teenage settlers, around 15 of them and with their faces masked, according to the Palestinian residents, had come over the crest of the hill above the village.

They had hurled stones at one large Palestinian house, this warm and previously quiet afternoon, before cutting down two or three olive trees, the villagers said. They then retreated back in the direction they had come.

By the time we arrived a single military jeep was parked on the crest of the hill and there were three border police vehicles at the top of the village’s only street, above the group of perhaps two dozen residents who had gathered earlier in the hope of repelling the invaders, almost certainly from the nearby and notoriously hardline Jewish settlement of Yitzhar.

A few Palestinian youths were still throwing stones ineffectually in the direction of the soldiers now patrolling the hill above on foot.

In any other week the day’s events in this tiny farming village in the rocky hills south of Nablus would have seemed entirely routine, a barely noticed confrontation in which the only person injured was a 14-year-old Palestinian boy, Arif Asari, admitted to hospital after being hit in the shoulder by an Israeli tear gas canister. Read more…