Wednesday, April 1,
Jane Adas arrived to join the team for two months and three Eastern
Mennonite University students arrived for a three day visit. Weston
Strickler spent the three days with the Al Atrash family. While
students Nathan Musselman and Laura Schildt were visiting people in
Beit Ummar with Dianne Roe to gather profiles, they heard that land
belonging to relatives of the family had been confiscated by the
settlement of Karmei Tzur.

Thursday, April 2.
The Palestinian headmistress of a girls' school opposite the Beit
Hadassah settlement had to leave during the school day when she heard
that settlers and bulldozers were encroaching on her family's land.
She told Dianne Roe that she had dashed home, "stopped the
bulldozers," then returned to school in time to fend off the dogs
that bother the girls on their way home after school.

Friday, April 3, 1998
Anne Montgomery rejoined the team.

CPTers went to visit Palestinian families in the Baka Valley who have
received demolition orders. Abu Jawad, aged 70, told the team that on
Thursday, March 26, he noticed armed settlers with leashed dogs
surveying his land. When he went to find out what they were doing,
they told him they had an order from the mayor of Kiryat Arba then
unleashed the dogs on him. He threw stones at the dogs. The settlers
first took a stance as if to shoot him, then left with their dogs.
Abu Jawad went to Hebron to lodge a complaint. While he was gone,
soldiers with a bulldozer came and dug a deep trench at the entrance
to the only access road leading up the hill towards his home. In the
process they broke the irrigation pipe under the road that is crucial
for getting water to his grape vines south of the road. They also cut
the electrical wires that send electricity to the Harsina settlement,
leaving the live wires exposed on the ground. When Abu Jawad?s wife,
aged 60, and daughter came out to see what was happening, soldiers,
including women, shoved them into the water-filled ditch on the north
side of the road and threatened to shoot them.

Another family in the area showed the team where settlers had put
razor-sharp concertina wire around large areas of their land. This
normally indicates the the first step in land confiscation. Recently,
settlers have also put a road on the family's land and turned a stone
hut that the family sleeps in during the hot summer months into a pen
for animals.

Saturday, April 4.
Dianne Roe and Jane Adas went to Beit Omar for family visits. They
met a Bedouin family who were refugees from 1948. Most of the family
have lived in a camp near Jericho. In 1974, when Abu Ahmad was
17, he bought 1 1/2 dunams (about a third of an acre) near Beit Omar.
He saved for 16 years and began building in 1990. It took 6 years to
finish the house and for his family of nine to move in. At that
point, in June, 1996, soldiers served the family a "stop building?
order. He has since applied three times for a permit and been turned
down. He told Roe and Adas that he has the land and he has a home,
but no right to live there and nowhere else to go.

Sunday, April 6 (Palm Sunday) The team worshiped together on
the mountain where the Al Atrash family's home was demolished.
The 14-year-old daughter Willa, showed them again those plants that survived
the demolition process and mourned those she was unable
to save.

An anonymous caller left a message on the answering machine in the
Chicago office threatening to send Israeli intelligence teams working
in Chicago to kill the staff who work in Chicago. (see CPT release.)

Monday, April 6
Anne Montgomery gave four visitors from Ireland, including a member of
the European Parliament, a tour of Hebron.

Tuesday, April 7. This is the first day of Eid al Adha, a major
Islamic holiday, celebrating the sacrifice of a sheep instead of
Ibrahim's (Abraham's) older son Ishmael (rather than the
Jewish/Christian version of the younger son, Isaac).

Wednesday, April 8. New team member Jamie Bouwmeester arrived.

Thursday, April 9. Neal Loevinger, a rabbinical student living in
Jerusalem, joined Rich Meyer at Al Atrash family encampment for two
days. Loevinger had not known about the extent of tree uprootings and
home demolitions in the West Bank. He reported that such actions are
mostly absent from the Israeli media and consciousness. Loevinger was
particularly incensed about the destruction of olive and fruit trees
belonging to Palestinian farmers, because, Jewish law specifically
forbids destroying trees.

This day marked the 50th anniversary of the Irgun and Stern Gang
massacre of Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin.

April 10 (Good Friday)
A Palestinian friend who lives south of Yatta near Ma'oun settlement
informed he team that about 100 families in that area, including his
own, have orders to evacuate their houses on Sunday (Easter.)

Amos Gvirtz and Harrie