Settlers rebuild evacuated outpost

100 right-wing activists in Kiryat Arba await IDF reaction; PM says Inciters belong in prison.

By TOVAH LAZAROFF, YAAKOV KATZ, YAAKOV LAPPIN
federman, noam 298 ap (photo credit: AP [file])
federman, noam 298 ap
(photo credit: AP [file])
Some 100 settlers waited at the Federman Farm outpost on the outskirts of Kiryat Arba late Sunday night for the IDF soldiers they fear will evacuate the site for the second time in 24 hours. Close to 1 a.m. on Sunday, soldiers, border policemen and police surprised the two families who lived at the outpost, located within the settlement's municipal boundaries, down a hillside from one of the main roads. They quickly evacuated the families and destroyed the two homes; one belonged to the family of well-known far-right activist Noam Federman, and the other to the family of the singer Sinai Tor. By evening, as soldiers and border policemen stood on the hill above, activists had built a small, white one-room structure at the site and set up a generator. Sunday morning's evacuation sparked an immediate protest by activists, who slashed the tires of Palestinian cars and vandalized a Muslim cemetery in nearby Hebron. They also threw stones at soldiers and damaged sections of the Kiryat Arba security fence. A number of settlers went on the radio Sunday morning and threatened further violence if evacuations continued. They even spoke of how they wished that IDF soldiers would be killed by their enemies. At the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert strongly condemned the settlers: "We are sick of this oral violence that either leads to, or affects, other violence," he said. During the evacuation, police arrested Federman and two of his daughters. According to police, the two girls placed burning paper on the roof of the police car that came to take them from their home. Federman was charged with attacking and injuring a police officer in the leg. The officer is expected to undergo three to four days of medical tests to determine the extent of the injury. On Sunday evening, the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court ordered the police to release Federman from custody. The decision was made after several policemen testified that Federman was handcuffed at the time that he allegedly assaulted their colleagues. One of Federman's daughters was released on bail and the other one to house arrest. When asked about her daughters' actions, Elisheva Federman pointed to the pile of rubble that had been her home and said she had not seen them attack the police vehicle, but that if they had, she would not blame them. "Their home had just been destroyed," Elisheva Federman said. She, her husband and their nine children, the youngest a one-year-old, had lived at the outpost for more than two years, she said. Early Sunday, they were asleep in their caravan home when they were awoken by a phone call. "It was a friend calling to say many security personnel had been seen in the area who appeared to be heading in our direction," Elisheva said. "We thought it was strange and we didn't know what to do. We thought maybe it was a mistake," she said. Soon they heard dogs barking and suddenly, she said, there were security personnel surrounding their home. "I looked outside and I saw what was like a black sea of uniforms coming down the path. Noam went outside to see what was going on. He didn't even have a chance to open his mouth when the police pushed him to the floor and cuffed him," she said. She thought she would have time to wake the children when suddenly all the windows shattered. They came in with hammers, she said. The glass scattered on top of the sleeping children, Elisheva said. "They didn't let me explain to the children what was happening." The children came out of the home in their pajamas, "as if they were survivors from the Holocaust," she said. They were shaking from fright. Their eight-year-old daughter become hysterical and couldn't stop crying, she said. The older children didn't want to leave. She herself was torn between staying with the older ones and caring for the little ones. With no telephone access, she urged some of them to run up the hill and to wake up anyone they could, and to ask if they could use the phone to call their grandparents to come get them, Elisheva said. The security services evacuated those family members who remained in the home; in her case, they did it with force, Elisheva said. They threw her on the ground and then took her to the police station with some of her children; then they released them, she said. When she returned at dawn, she saw that the security forces had destroyed everything in the home, the books, the plates and the furniture. They scattered the remnants of 18 years of her married life into the mud and the dirt around the home, Elisheva said. Her narrative, which she told to reporters on Sunday afternoon, was interrupted a number of times by her son Eli, six, who was searching through the shards of his home looking for his toys. Jews, she said, had lived in this spot for the last 10 years. This outpost, she said, was so unimportant that it did not even warrant a mention on the list of 105 unauthorized outposts that attorney Talia Sasson compiled for the government in 2005. Hagit Ofran of Peace Now said the High Court of Justice had determined that the outpost was illegal more than a year ago and had told the families that they needed to leave. "It is an important move, in that we hope that this will mean that the government is taking seriously the settlers' violation of the law," Ofran said. IDF sources said that the Federman family had been given notice of the planned evacuation. The sources said the family had even petitioned the courts against the evacuation and demolition orders, but had lost. "The whole process was done according to the law and demolition orders were issued against each structure on the farm," a source said. But Elisheva said she had a legal right to live in the location and that she intended to rebuild and move back in as soon as possible.