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Urgent Action Alert: Defend the land of Azzawiye, Rafat and Deir Ballut villages!Towards the end of February 2004, Deir Ballut villagers told IWPS that two Bedouin families living on land about 200 metres away from the western most house in the village, were told by the Israeli Occupation Forces that they should be off the land within two weeks - because Israel wanted to start building the Apartheid Wall in this area. The Bedouins had nowhere to go and besides, they didn't want to leave, so they stayed. Right on time, soldiers arrived in Deir Ballut on March 12th to deliver land expropriation orders. The soldiers told the villagers to meet them on the land two days later so that they could explain the Hebrew maps marking the route of the wall. However, Israeli engineers came in the night and marked the path of the wall without informing the villagers. On March 14th 2004, the soldiers returned. They were confronted by villagers waving their title deeds proving that they had owned the land for many, many years. The soldiers said they would begin bulldozing for the Apartheid Wall within one week. The villagers told them to leave and not to attempt to steal their land (pictured above). The bulldozing of land in Azzawiye, Rafat and Deir Ballut villages constitutes the major phase of the Apartheid Wall in the Salfit region. The Wall has been completed in the northern most West Bank, in the Jenin, Tulkarem and Qalqilya regions, and has caused extreme hardship to the Palestinians living there. There have also been attempts to bulldoze land and trees for the Wall in the Ramallah area, which have not yet succeeded. If the wall is built through Azzawiye, Rafat and Deir Ballut, it will complete a trail of destruction of land right down to the Southern West Bank. PENGON's Stop the Wall Campaign reports that Deir Ballut will only be left with 750 dunums of the 100 000 dunums of land it collectively owns. 80% of the village's agricultural land will be isolated, and the wall will separate eight families on the eastern side of Deir Ballut, from their village. The stolen land will be used to extend the settlements of Peduel and Ale Zehav by an extra 550 houses (land to the West of Deir Ballut to be stolen is pictured below). In Azzawiye, PENGON reports that the Wall parallels the Israeli by-pass road from the south east, which surrounds the residential area of the village, and then ends in the Jabal al Kurum area in the south west. The wall will isolate some 18,000 dunums of Azzawiye's lands. Families from Azzawiye, Rafat and Deir Ballut have already lost a lot of land over the years. For example, the family of Hazim Suleiman Ahmad Mohammed Moosa (75 family members) lost 600 dunums of land in 1948. This land was used to build the Israeli town of Rosh Hayin. They now stand to lose most of their remaining land - over one thousand olive trees - their only source of survival. The villagers of Azzawiye, Rafat and Deir Ballut intend to resist the building of the wall through non-violent means. In other villages this has meant that villagers - men, women and children - drop everything to rush to the land and place their bodies in front of the bulldozers. These villages need your help today to stop the theft of their land! They need their land to graze their goats and sheeps and to grow their crops. It should not be expropriated by the Israeli State.
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