South Hebron Hills, Simia
Today we again witnessed the occupation at its most active.
While driving, we noticed a large gathering in the village of Simia (located in Area C).
It turned out that the army was there with heavy tools and trucks, and evacuating a transportable caravan from the outskirts of the village, tomorrow morning to be opened as a school for the village children. Until now, the children have gone to school in the neighboring village on the mountain beyond the bustling and dangerous Route 60, which has no safe passage for them. The village had not receive any eviction orders in preparation for this. Present, here apart from the villagers, were representatives of the local authority of the South Hebron Hills including the person in charge of education, as well as representatives of Combatants for Peace from the village, Farhan and Kader.
When we contacted the responsible officer who was present, she explained that this is a transportable structure, and therefore there is no obligation to give an evacuation order in advance. Now the building was loaded onto a truck and it began to move in order to transport it and all the accompanying equipment to be stored in Gush Etzion (just as we saw a few months ago at the Jabour family near Susiya). What next? The village would be able to release the confiscated equipment when the time came for certain procedures and when they had paid a large sum (perhaps the value of the equipment itself).
Kader told us that tomorrow they are starting to build the same building in the same place, and when we asked, "it will be destroyed again," he replied: "Never mind. We will build again and again. Nothing will stop us."
When we left the field after a long stay the group of teachers (women and men) who were supposed to teach tomorrow at the school, arrived.
Two representatives of a foreign organization (Christian?) who live in Yatta were also with us and were interested in the event and also interested in us.
We continued north to El Fawwar junction, the entrance to 'Abda was blocked
On the way we stopped at the vegetable field near the road and bought some of their produce. The farmers no longer try to install a shed and a sales stand as they did in the past, because the army destroys and confiscates everything.
They ran to the loaded truck to fetch the vegetables we asked for, and were happy to make a few shekels.