RAMALLAH, Friday, February 12, 2021 (WAFA) – Israeli forces Friday late morning cracked down on an olive-planting event to the east of Burin town, south of the West Bank city of Nablus, according to local sources.

Bashar Eid, a villager, said that Israeli troops cordoned the area off since the early morning hours, closing all roads.

They violently dispersed the participants and international peace activists who managed to make it to the event called for to plant olive saplings in the villagers’ lands threatened with confiscation and located adjacent to the encroaching Givat Ronen colonial settlement, firing concussion grenades and tear gas canisters toward them.

No injuries were reported though.

The village among other villages in Nablus district has become the scene of weekly protests against the Israeli occupation authorities’ move to construct and expand colonial settlements.

The village has also become the scene of frequent settler attacks, cutting down fully grown olive trees, setting fire to fields and crops, stealing the olive harvest and attacking olive harvesters and foreign volunteers.

There are over 700,000 Israeli settlers living in Jewish-only colonial settlements across the West Bank in violation of international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention which expressly bans the relocation of the occupying nation's civilian population to the land of the occupied.

Israel occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights following the 1967 war, and has since built hundreds of illegal Jewish-only settlements throughout the occupied territories.

K.F.