Burin: Continual Unchecked Settler Harassment

Village of Burin http://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/Burin_927/index.html

Older buildings in a seemly quiet village.

A newer home in Burin

This past week, MPTers made a short visit to a friend in Burin, a village of over 2,500, located five miles southwest of Nablus. This visit was to show support for the friend, but also inform him that MPT is willing to help with the harvesting of the olives in the fall.

For many years, Burin has been subjected to hundreds of incidents a year of unchecked settler harassment from the illegal Israeli settlements of Yitzar and Bracha. Settlers enter the village to injure people, smash cars, cut electric lines, cut and burn olive trees, butcher village animals, and burn homes.

Burin is harassed by settlers from 2 settlements, Yitzar and Bracha, on nearby hills.

The friend MPT visited had been injured in a settler attach in February 2010. This injury put him in a Nablus hospital for a month and left him with several scars on his head. MPT was active in the village several times during the fall of 2009: spending the night nearby after settlers tried to burn a home under construction and viewed the aftermath of the destructive cutting of 95 ripe olive trees and later 30 olive trees. MPTers helped pick the ripe olives from the cut trees and later picked in an area near the cut trees.

[To read the blogs of MPT activity in Burin see:

http://mptinpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/09/burin-construction-site-threatened-by.html Sept. 09

http://mptinpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/10/burin-tree-massacre.html October. 09

http://mptinpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/10/burin-olive-harvesting-under-occupation.html Oct. 09

http://mptinpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/11/more-burin-settler-violence.html November 09

http://mptinpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/11/tree-planting-protest-in-burin.html November 09

Accounts of the situation in Burin in various other media sources reinforces the fact that the settler violence go unchecked in this village.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/special-feature-the-land-of-unchecked-settler-harassment-1.251284 August 08

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/6762273/Israeli-settlers-threaten-to-make-Palestinians-pay-the-price-on-the-West-Bank.html December 09

http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/2172.shtml January 10

http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/IOF-Uses-Live-Ammunition-on-Burin-Demonstration.html Jan. 10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnjqESWwDGY&feature=player_embedded#! Feb.10

Why this harassment continues unchecked might be a logical question.