Demolitions Continue on Shaky Ground--Sydney Morning Herald

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The farmers of Beit Ula spent two years preparing their new groves of fruit and nut and olive trees, clearing rocks, building stone terraces and digging deep cisterns to catch the scarce rainwater.

It took the Israeli Army less than a day to destroy it.

"We heard they were here at 6.30 in the morning, when it was still dark," said Sami al-Adam, one of eight farmers whose terraces were bulldozed on January 15.

"There must have been dozens of soldiers with jeeps and bulldozers and they brought a lot of Filipino workers, or maybe they were Thai, who pulled up the trees and cut them and buried them so we wouldn't be able to plant them again," he said.

When the soldiers and police withdrew from the site, in the low hills on the West Bank's border with Israel, 6.4 hectares of trees and terraces had been uprooted and bulldozed. The concrete cisterns were broken open and choked with rubble. Two years of labour and a cash investment of more than €100,000 ($160,000) had all gone to waste.

The Israeli military department that controls the occupied West Bank - called the Civil Administration - subsequently said it demolished the terraces because they were built illegally on land belonging to the state of Israel.

This came as a surprise to the West Bank farmers, who brandished documents with Palestinian, Israeli and even Turkish stamps which, they say, prove their title to the land. And it came as an even bigger surprise to the European Union, which had paid for the lion's share of the project, €64,000, as part of a campaign to improve "food security" for the Palestinian population.

"We were pretty distressed, obviously," said a European Commission spokeswoman, Alex de Mauny. "It's a huge concern, not only in terms of the livelihood of the people we were trying to help out - obviously it's a disaster in human terms. These are not rich people, they are living very much on the margins - but there's the broader issue of why it happened, and how we can stop it from happening again."