Settler attacks push Palestinians to abandon West Bank village, residents say
MAGHAYER AL-DEIR, Palestinian Territories: Palestinian residents of Maghayer Al-Deir in the occupied West Bank told AFP on Thursday that they had begun packing their belonging and preparing to leave the village following repeated attacks by Israeli settlers.
Yusef Malihat, a resident of the tiny village east of Ramallah, told AFP his community had decided to leave because its members felt powerless in the face of the settler violence.
'No one provides us with protection at all,' he said, a keffiyeh scarf protecting his head from the sun as he loaded a pickup truck with chain-link fencing previously used to pen up sheep and goats.
'They demolished the houses and threatened us with expulsion and killing,' he said, as a group of settlers looked on from a new outpost a few hundred meters away.
The West Bank is home to about three million Palestinians, but also some 500,000 Israelis living in settlements that are considered illegal under international law.
Settlement outposts, built informally and sometimes overnight, are considered illegal under Israeli law too, although enforcement is relatively rare.
The Israeli military told AFP it was 'looking into' the legality of the outpost at Maghayer Al-Deir.
'It's very sad, what's happening now... even for an outpost,' said Itamar Greenberg, an Israeli peace activist present at Maghayer Al-Deir on Thursday.
'It's a new outpost 60 meters from the last house of the community, and on Sunday one settler told me that in one month, the Bedouins will not be here, but it (happened much) more quickly,' he told AFP.
The Palestinian Authority's Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission denounced Maghayer Al-Deir's displacement, describing it as being the result of the 'terrorism of the settler militias.'
It said in a statement that a similar fate had befallen 29 other Bedouin communities, whose small size and isolation in rural areas make them more vulnerable.
In the area east of Ramallah, where hills slope down toward the Jordan Valley, Maghayer Al-Deir was one of the last remaining communities after the residents of several others were recently displaced.
Its 124 residents will now be dispersed to other nearby areas.
Malihat told AFP some would go to the Christian village of Taybeh just over 10 kilometers (six miles) away, and others to Ramallah.
Uncertain they would be able to return, the families loaded all they could fit in their trucks, including furniture, irrigation pipes and bales of hay.
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