'Arsan Najar, head of the Burin village council, Nablus District.

I am the father of seven sons.I have served as head of the Burin village council for four years. I also serve as deputy director of the general association of charities in the Occupied Territories. I once served as consultant in the Youth and Sport Ministry of the Palestinian Authority. For close to twenty-five years, I was a high school principal.

Burin is located along the Ramallah-Nablus road. It has about 3,000 residents. It used to have tens of thousands of residents. Most left to go to Arab countries or to the United States. The villagers own 24,000 dunam [6,000 acres] of land, of which thirty percent are olive groves.

In the past, most of the residents made a living from work in Israel, usually in construction, and from farming. The income generated from the olives and olive oil constituted an important source of livelihood. Almost all residents of the village – the elderly, the young, women, children – take part in the olive picking. For two years now, since the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada, most of the villagers have been unemployed. A small percentage found work in PA offices in Burin and the nearby cities of Ramallah and Nablus, but most did not find work. Olive picking thus increased in importance as a source of income.

The Yizhar settlement was established in 1982. It lies about three kilometers south of the village, on mountaintop land that belonged to Burin, 'Asira al-Qabliya, 'Urif, and 'Einabus. ..

At the end of the 1980s, the Israeli authorities began to construct a bypass road. The road was completed in 1995. The road passed along land that was owned by residents of Burin, and to make the road, Israel expropriated hundreds of dunam of land lying south of the village.

The bypass road begins in nearby Hawara and connects the settlements with the towns and cities within Israel. Not only did the bypass road result in the loss of hundreds of dunam of our land, it also divided our land in two: one portion adjacent to the village, to which the villagers had access, and the other part, which includes large amount of land on the other side of the bypass road. Since the separation, many problems stand in the way of the villagers to cultivate their land on the other side of the road.

These problems got worse after October 2000. Now, in addition to abuse by the settlers, the Israeli army regularly patrols the area and generally deny the farmers access to their fields on the other side of the road. The army does not allow Palestinian vehicles to use the road. For this reason, the farmers usually go to their fields only when the soldiers are not around, by foot or on the backs of animals...

In recent years, settlers from the Yizhar settlement have set fire to hundreds of olive trees in groves adjacent to the settlement. They also tried to prevent Palestinians from reaching their groves and fields. Sometimes they attacked villagers and threatened them with weapons.

The acts of revenge by settlers has grown in recent years. They torched close to two hundred olive trees in groves adjacent to the settlement and stole about eighty heads of flock that were grazing on villagers' land. The residents filed complaints at the Palestinian civilian and military DCO in Salfit, which forwarded them to the Israeli DCO and Israeli police in Hawara.

The olive harvest is particularly important this year because the crops are plentiful.. The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture set the 20 of October as the day to start the harvest. We have also been waiting for the first rains, which help ripen the olives.

On Wednesday, 2 October, I was not in the village. The next day, villagers told me that settlers have picked olives in fields belonging to village residents.

On 3 October, at 8:00 A.M., villagers saw about twenty settlers from Yizhar,who were divided into a number of groups, picking olives in Palestinian-owned groves. They had clubs, ladders, and blankets to place on the ground to catch the olives.

Some villagers came to me for help. I called the Palestinian DCO in Hawara and told them what was happening. Around 2:00 P.M., an army jeep, a police jeep, and a white jeep belonging to the Israeli DCO came to the site. They parked near the road leading to Yizhar and went over to the settlers.

We watched from the village. The police and soldiers spent about thirty minutes with the settlers and then left. The settlers continued their picking.

Around 5:00 P.M., three settler-owned vehicles showed up – two passenger cars and a Subaru van. They gathered the setters and the olives, and left. . On Friday, about fifteen to twenty settlers returned to pick olives. They picked from 7:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.. The vehicles came, collected them and the olives, and left. Police and soldiers did not show up that day, apparently because they finished work early due to the Sabbath that was about to start.

Despite the dangers involved, we decided to go to our groves on Saturday and take advantage of the fact that the settlers do not work on the Sabbath, and thus save what we could of the harvest. Some villagers went to the groves. I was not in the village that day. I was told that the settlers did not go into the groves, but that they taunted the pickers.

The next day, some villagers went to pick olives in the groves. The official picking season had not yet started, and the olives were not yet ripe. But we had no choice, because we feared that the settlers would steal all the olives. Soldiers have been patrolling the bypass road but have not prevented the villagers from getting to their groves to pick olives.

'Arsan Ibrahim Najar, age 68, is the head of the Burin village council. He is married with seven children. The testimony was taken by Raslan Mahagna, in Burin, on 9 October 2002.