Ramallah: Residents of the Beit Foreek village, east of the city of Nablus in the Occupied West Bank, have discovered suspicious-looking objects installed on a privately-owned stretch of mountainside near their town by Israelis from the neighbouring colony of Itamar.
The mysterious devices were first spotted by a group of Palestinian youngsters from the top of Al Qa’ada Mountain, which is owned by the town’s families and is the site of frequent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians.
A senior official from Beit Foreek municipality told Gulf News that the objects, planted next to rocks near the peak of the mountain, bore Hebrew inscriptions and were all connected by wires to the entrance of the colony.
The official said the colonists and the occupation forces used the mountain to provide Itamar with protection and they normally did not allow residents of Beit Foreek to climb it, denying them access to their farmland.
The official said Palestinian authorities were now trying to determine the function of the devices by studying photographs taken by townsfolk.
The issue of the strange objects has been raised by Palestinian officials of the Palestinian-Israeli Civil Affairs Liaison Office, and an official complaint is being submitted to the Israeli Civil Administration, which runs the occupied West Bank on behalf of the Israeli government.
The Beit Foreek official said the colonists had no right to install the objects on private Palestinian land.
The town’s authorities, fearing a possible threat to human health, are demanding that they be removed immediately.
Ghassan Doghlous, the Palestinian official overseeing Israeli colonial activities in the northern areas of the Occupied West Bank, suspects these objects may be part of colonists’ tactics to “grab more and more Palestinian land”.
He told Gulf News the issue could be linked to the insistence of the Israeli occupation forces to support the colonists regardless of legal or humanitarian considerations.
Beit Foreek, a Palestinian town with a population of more than 15,000, falls under the jurisdiction of the Nablus Governorate.
The settlers of Itamar are infamous as the most hardline of all the Israeli colonists, attacking Palestinian civilians in nearby villages and towns, uprooting their crops, killing their cattle, and burning their houses.
Itamar has several outposts and covers a total area of about 7,000 dunums. More than 2,500 Israelis live in the colony, which is systematically encroaching into Palestinian villages and towns around Nablus.
