450 guava trees cut down near Jenin in a day of attacks

Israeli settlers cut down about 450 bearing guava trees at Khirbet Farsin, southwest of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, on Saturday, local sources said. The grove was in fruit.

Farmers at Burqa were attacked the same day by groups of settlers who fired in their direction and tried to set one of their vehicles alight, according to accounts from the village. At Arrabeh, settlers turned their livestock loose into olive groves belonging to Palestinians and attacked the people who came out to them.

Settlers at Khirbet Khallet al-Hommos, in Masafer Yatta south of Hebron, severed the fencing that rings Palestinian farms and houses there and let animals loose around the homes. At Khirbet al-Kharaba they went onto the ground beside houses and interfered with the fencing that encloses land planted with olives.

Farmland was set on fire at Wadi Sa'ir, north of Hebron. Settlers went into the Jabal Rashniya area at Deir Abu Mash'al and onto agricultural land at Barqa, near Ramallah, and into Khirbet al-Marajim, which lies between al-Mughayyir and Duma. At Bir Quza in Beita, south of Nablus, they put Israeli flags up in the streets and on Palestinian houses.

None of these were one place under siege. They were a dozen separate patches of ground in five governorates on a single Saturday, each one a small item that reaches nobody outside the village it happened in — which is the condition that makes the whole of it hard to count and easy to leave uncounted.

What was attacked is also the kind of thing that does not come back within a news cycle. A cut fence is a bill to be paid before the animals get in again. A grove of 450 trees that had reached the point of bearing was years in the making, and the ground it stood on stays in the family's name while producing nothing at all.