How many settlers in hebron

Search Search. Home United States U. Africa 54 - November 11, VOA Africa Listen live. VOA Newscasts Latest program. VOA Newscasts. Previous Next. Middle East. December 01, PM. Shaul acknowledged his point—that restrictions on Palestinian movement would appear to have nothing to do with security—but he said that he wanted us to draw this conclusion in the course of the tour.

Even during the day, when trade in the commercial street below is active, this area was virtually deserted. There, we saw a passageway, a covered alley, that used to lead to a market; now it is filled with concrete blocks and barbed wire, and there is no market on the other side.

People come and go through back alleys or, where there is no back door, they enter and exit their houses by climbing a ladder to the roof. You can recognize the houses in which Palestinians still live because they have cages—steel bars covered with fine chicken wire—on the windows, to protect the residents from stones thrown by settlers. When settlers squat in a house, they remove the cages. Unlike the Palestinians, they are here under the protection of hundreds of troops stationed at dozens of checkpoints.

Shaul pointed out the details: the rubber bullet on the ground, the welded door that was unsealed when activists mounted a legal challenge to the practice and, when they failed, re-welded. The Palestinians are to be protected by Israeli civilian police, who are still waiting for political will to back their doing their job. Settlers here are under Israeli civilian law, while Palestinians are under military rule.

Hebron is a microcosm of the West Bank, a place where the key practices of the occupation can be observed up close, in a single afternoon. It is a form of activism for Amro to maintain the center in H Youth Against Settlements leads a couple of tours a week, while Breaking the Silence has tours almost daily. Most of the Youth Against Settlements tour groups are visitors from abroad. Most of the Breaking the Silence groups are made up of Israelis.

Israeli citizens can visit Amro in H-2, but they are not allowed by Israeli soldiers to pass into H For them, seeing the other side of Hebron is not an option. It was after dark.

We climbed a muddy hill to reach the back entrance; Palestinians are not permitted to use the paved road that runs in front of the house. An older man, using a cane, was also making his way to his house through the mud.

Back home, Amro showed us the remains of a one-room addition he had been building, slowly, for a year and a half. Two days before my visit, settlers had dismantled it. Because civilian life in H-2, almost absurdly, is technically the purview of Palestinian authorities, Amro had all the legal documentation necessary for the construction.

As Amro stood by what remained of the construction and showed me the video of the attack, the soldiers again looked on. As we moved into a different part of the front yard, a soldier, his face covered with a black scarf and his hands on an Uzi, followed us. The I. On the back porch, barely out of sight of the soldiers, the leaders of the tiny Palestinian community that remains in H-2, a dozen men and a couple of women, sat around a fire burning in a metal barrel.

They smoked cigarettes, drank coffee, and talked about the corruption of the Palestinian administration. I asked Amro questions about the future, and he answered with the ease of a man who has very little to lose. He talked about the need for international pressure. The activists of Breaking the Silence are less optimistic. His mission, then, is to make the house win a little bit less, or a little more slowly.

In the past few years, as Israeli politics have taken an autocratic, sharp-right turn, Breaking the Silence has found itself increasingly marginalized, portrayed by politicians—including cabinet-level officials—and the media as a group of spies or traitors.

A right-wing activist group distributed an online video in which Gvaryahu was vilified as a foreign agent and a terrorist sympathizer. The parliamentary opposition is not talking about the occupation, much of the media is too ready to pick up libelous stories about Breaking the Silence, and the group has a larger audience in most European countries than it does in Israel.

As much as Breaking the Silence may be perceived domestically as representing the Palestinian side, their Palestinian interlocutors rarely forget that they are dealing with former Israeli soldiers. Shaul and Gvaryahu spoke to me about this, over lunch on January 1st. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and allies like Bennett nor their opponents won enough parliamentary seats to form a viable coalition.

According to several UN Security Council resolutions, the most recent in , Israeli settlements are illegal under international law as they violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population to the area it occupies. Israel captured West Bank and East Jerusalem in the war and quickly began settling the newly conquered territory. Today, more than , Israeli settlers, in addition to three million Palestinians, live in the two areas.

Published On 1 Dec MPs now have until December 11 to find a solution or see parliament dissolved once again. More from News.