Riham Jahshan, a resident of Beit Jala, West Bank, was in her car with her children when a military jeep stopped and blocked the road. When she asked what was going on, a soldier told her she had no business on the road.
“I told him, ‘My home is down here. I need to go down.’” He told her again to go back.
“When I argued, he put his rifle in my face,” she said.
Now, Ms. Jahshan and other Palestinians are wondering how much more complicated and dangerous travel will become under Israel’s E1 settlement expansion plan, which will link Israeli settlements in the West Bank with Jerusalem, effectively cutting off Palestinian communities from each other.
Already, “many farmers couldn’t access their lands,” she says. For instance, “They were deprived of the grape harvest in al-Khader.”
“Many of my friends have been beaten and assaulted just for trying to access their land, land that is currently within the territory of the [Palestinian] Authority, but they were prevented from getting to it.”
“Lately, the E1 plan is killing even the smallest bit of hope that is left,” she says.
Ms. Jahshan talks about Palestinian situation in the West Bank in this video. Read more about how the West Bank has been carved up by Israeli settlements in “Piece by Piece,” in the December issue of ONE.