AT-TUWANI, HEBRON, March 16, 2011 (WAFA) - Residents of the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani, in the southern Hebron hills, woke up Wednesday morning to discover that someone had destroyed six of their olive trees in the night.

The villagers said that the perpetrators were almost certainly Israeli settlers from the nearby illegal outpost of Havat Ma'on.

“Settlers did this. ...They did this because of the settlers who were murdered near Nablus,” said Fadil Ahmed Raba'i, referring to the recent murder of a family of five settlers inside the Israeli settlement of Itamar, within the West Bank.

The destroyed trees were approximately 15 years old and would have produced olives in the fall harvest had they not been damaged. They were the property of four residents of At-Tuwani.

At-Tuwani has experienced frequent vandalism of olive groves since construction of the Ma'on settlement in 1984. Most recently, on February 21, Raba’i reported that three mature olive trees in his family's grove had been damaged.

Since the mid 1980s, Palestinians in Tuwani and the surrounding villages have faced frequent threats and acts of violence and intimidation from settlers, but remain committed to nonviolent resistance.

Because villagers in the region are dependent on dry-land subsistence farming, aggression resulting in damage to trees or crops or denial of access to agricultural lands constitutes a significant threat to the communities.

M.A.