Description

In Pictures: Village fights for survival
Jakob Schiller for Al Jazeera

July 19, 2011

Wadi Fukin village, which sits just west of Bethlehem along the 1967 border, was destroyed when the Israeli army dynamited much of the town during and in the years following the 1948 war, and then rebuilt when residents returned almost 20 years later.

It was the only time, as far as many Palestinians can recall, that residents rebuilt a town destroyed in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.

Now the town's 1,200 residents are facing what many fear could be its second death. The neighbouring Beitar Illit settlement has the highest birthrate of any settlement in the occupied West Bank and currently houses more than 40,000 Israeli settlers. The expanding settlement, deemed illegal under international law, continues to take more of Wadi Fukin's land.

Ironically, it is often the men from Wadi Fukin who run the jackhammers and build the settlement's multi-story homes. Land confiscation, along with cheap Israeli produce that has flooded the Palestinian markets, is putting farmers in this verdant valley out of business and pushing them into construction jobs within the settlement. Under the proposed route of the Israeli wall, Wadi Fukin will eventually be surrounded on three sides, cutting the village off from the rest of the West Bank.

See News source link for photos of Wadi Fukin