The Occupation forces stationed at the military checkpoint south of Deir Ballout issued the people of Deir Ballout and Kifr Diek a military order that will amount to the confiscation of 538 dunums and 700 square meters of land, located in the east of Deir Ballout and west of Kafr Diek. These orders announce a new phase of the Apartheid Wall on the land of the two villages. The new path extends from the north of Deir Ballout and along the east of the village until the military checkpoint located in the south. It will annex the settlement block Brukhin, Aleh Zahav and Baduel. Thousands of dunums of agricultural land from Kafr Diek that lie between the village and Deir Ballout will be isolated.
According to the mayor of Deir Ballout âthis new path of the Wall will isolate and destroy more than 3,000 dunums, most of it planted with olive trees.â This destruction comes in addition to the dispossession caused by the path of the Wall that runs west of the village. The Occupation has already finished this part of the Wall and has thus isolated or destroyed some 10,000 dunums of land used by the shepherds for their goats, sheep and cows.
Deir Ballout is thus losing the dairy farming possibilities with the theft of land to the west as well as its agricultural production with the loss of land on the east. These have been the two main sources of income for the village. The mayor of the village clearly points at the reality faced by the community: âThese Zionist expansion procedures are there to annex our land and add it to the settlements that are already built on our land. The Wall, when they finish it, will surround Deir Ballout, Ezawiye and Rafat in a small ghetto containing 12,500 people without [a] future.â Only a tunnel under Israeli control located in the north of the ghetto will be left for the people to enter and exit.
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