Prime Minister Salam Fayyad joined over 200 Israeli, Palestinian and internationals marking Land Day on Tuesday in the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan, in the West Bank governorate of Salfit.
The march began at around 10am and lasted until 12:30pm, Israeli peace activist Jonathan Pollack said, beginning near the Ein Entweteg Spring in the village.
Qarawat Bani Hassan, located thirty kilometers southwest of Nablus, is home to roughly 4,000 people, most of them refugees from Kufr Bara. Approximately 89% of the village's land, including the Ein Enwetef spring, is in Area C, under complete Israeli control, and "is in constant threat of annexation and settlement expansion," Pollack said.
Israeli settlers have been building the Havat Yaair settlement outpost on a hilltop above the the Ein Enwetef spring since 2003 on land belonging to Palestinians from the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan. The Israeli settlers and military regularly prevent Palestinians from accessing the area and since December 2009 the settlers have made repeated attempts to begin construction at the site of the spring.
The Ein Enwetef spring traditionally served Palestinians residents of Qarawat Bani Hassan and neighboring villages as a source of water for both agriculture and herding.
"Herding, a major source of livelihood in the Salfit region for decades, is threatened with extinction by limited access to traditional water sources, contamination of local springs by raw sewage dumped by Israeli settlements and restrictions on movement in the area," Pollack noted.
Ein Enwetef is one of dozens of fresh water springs across the West Bank to which Palestinian access is denied or limited.
Land Day, 30 March, is an annual day of commemoration for Palestinians of events in 1976. In response to the Israeli government's announcement of a plan to expropriate thousands of dunams of land for security and settlement purposes, a general strike and marches were organized in Palestinian towns from the Galilee to the Negev. In the ensuing confrontations with the Israeli army and police, six Palestinian citizens were killed, about one hundred were wounded, and hundreds of others arrested.
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