Bulldozers have begun to destroy farmland around Al Jeeb village, north-west of Jerusalem as the Israeli occupation begins the construction of another section of the Apartheid Wall to the west of the village.
***image2***The bulldozers came under army protection and the area was designated a military closed zone. The villagers were prevented from accessing the land and they could only stand and watch from distance as the bulldozers destroyed their decades-old olive trees, wheat and other vegetables. Over 180 dunum was destroyed, the main source of income for hundreds of villagers.
When this section of the Wall is constructed the Israeli government will give most of this stolen land to expansion of the nearby illegal Israeli settlement, Givâat Zeâev.
Part of the Wall has already been built around the village isolating 6000 dunum of farm land from the villagers and destroying other 250 dunum under the footprint of the Wall. The Wall has enclosed al Jeeb and the nearby villages of Al Judaire, Old Beit Hanina and Bir Nabala within a small ghetto, forcing the Palestinian people from these villages to use a tunnel, which runs under a settler-only road, to move in and out of the area and access Jerusalem. At the tunnel, they are subjected to passing through a 24hour checkpoint.
The ghetto of al Jeeb and the surrounding villages is just one of a series of small enclaves created by the apartheid Wall with the intention to render Palestinian life there impossible, to expel the population and finally to colonize the land with Jewish settlers.
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