Far'un

When we arrived at the council building of Far'un we met C who works as a cleaner at the elementary school. It was the last day of the  school winter holiday and she was preparing the classrooms for the lessons.  She proudly showed us around the place, which although it is simple and rudimentary, is well looked-after and testifies to care and love.

We met the deputy head of the village, A. The main request of the village inhabitants is to change their seasonal gate (number 708)  to an agricultural gate, with all that this implies. This is so that they will be able to return to their hot-houses and the fields where their crops are, which have been denied to them for many years.  They submitted their request more than a month ago but no answer has been received.  We suggested to them that they should submit another detailed request (in which there should be details of their crops that grew there in the past, and also details of the area concerned , together with its ownership).

Additional complaints were about the difficulties of their tractors’ passage to their land, and cases of fires in which the security fence prevented the Palestinian farmers from extinguishing them.  They also complained  about the damage to their orchards caused by  flocks from Taibeh.

According to them, in 2013 they submitted a total of 780 requests, of which 454 by agricultural and building workers were confirmed; 48 were rejected and 278 were not even answered at all !

We sent a letter to Adel, head of the DCO in which we quoted the villagers’ requests, and also two individual requests from farmers about permits and gates :

Herewith two individual applications which we request you (Adal) to take care of :        

1.  initials of the person concerned : his permit has not been renewed after 14.1.2014 in spite of two requests which he submitted and which were not answered at all.

2. initials of the person concerned  : he had a permit for the Jubara gate (which has been closed).  Now he has received a permit for gate 735 which makes it very difficult for him to do his work.  He requests that the permit should be changed to gate 708.  (He also has a permit to work in Israel)

We also have a complaint of our own :  our recent letters to you have remained unanswered or acknowledged, in spite of verbal promises which were given to us by you in the past on the subject of cooperation