Along with their expansion of housing, settlers around Turmusaya are expanding the land they use for their agri-businesses.Human-rights groups accuse Jewish militants of poisoning and uprooting Palestinian olive trees that stand in their way, and of beating their farmers.
On the side of the house, the settlers had spray-painted the slogan "Greetings from the Prisoners of Zion" — likely a reference to settlers who were in prison under investigation for burning down a house in the Arab village of Duma, in July, killing three members of a family, including an eighteen-month-old child.
Abraham also commissioned a series of drawings for villages of low-cost dwellings in Israeli territory that could house Israeli settlers relocating from the West Bank.
He makes a living building houses for settlers, a reminder of the bitter intimacy of the occupied territories.
A man with a pickaxe pounded at the dome of the building that had housed the settlers' yeshiva.
Israeli rightwingers are furiously condemning the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for his 10-month freeze on building houses for settlers on the West Bank.
The farther south the barrier runs, the more it starts to swerve and dip eastwards, like a vast territorial river, to envelop ten settlements, housing 19,000 settlers, built on occupied land.
A10 Israel Denies Discord in Gaza The spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon denied an article published in The New York Times that said Israelis and Palestinians had failed to agree on how to deal with the houses of settlers who will be pulled out of Gaza.
There are two kinds of settlements in Jerusalem: Jewish neighborhoods built by the government on land annexed to Jerusalem in 1967, in which 190,000 Israelis presently live; and small settlement compounds in the middle of the Palestinian neighborhoods surrounding the Old City, housing 2000 settlers, guarded by a similar number of armed guards.
But at two buildings, the 1950 House and the Settlers' House, do touch is the rule.
