HEBRON– The Israeli occupation authorities today notified two villagers of Birin, south of Hebron, to demolish a house and stop construction of another, according to a municipal source.
The village mayor, Farid Burqan, said that Israeli forces barged their way into the southern West Bank village, and handed a villager a notice to raze his 140-square-meter house and another a similar notice to knock down the stone terraces surrounding his plot of land.
They also handed another villager a notice, ordering him to halt the construction of his house.
According to the Land Research Center, Israel has frequently issued military stop-construction and demolition orders against various residential and agricultural structures and dismantled barns in the locality, citing the lack of rarely-issued construction permits as a pretext.
In December 2017, Israel delivered stop-construction orders to the locality’s sole clinic and building intended to serve as a primary school for the community’s 60 children
In June 2019, as showed in a PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department’s report, Israel seized 4,800 dunams of land from several localities, including Birin, for the expansion of Bani Haiver.
Located to the southwest of Bani Na‘im, Birin has a population of 160 and is flanked by Bani Haiver colonial settlement from the east and the settler-only bypass Road No. 60 from the west. Its residents were originally expelled from Naqab in southern Israel and now depend on agriculture and livestock as their main source of livelihood.
Source: Palestine and News Information Agency