Palestinian mayor explains high death toll in small village: ‘Pressure births explosion’
Source: Mondoweiss, August 10, 2016
A year ago, the Sair Martyrs’ Cemetery was marked with graves a decade or more old. Today more than half the tombs are marked with dates from the past eight months. Fresh wreaths of colorful flowers lay atop each of the close rows of stone — fourteen stone slabs that have taken up nearly every available space in the cemetery.
“We are trying to come up with options for a way to expand the cemetery,” Jamaal Faroukh, the head of the Religious Affairs Office in Sair told Mondoweiss.
“There is space for, one, two, maybe three more graves, but we are expecting that we will run out of room soon,” he explained, alluding to the expectation of more Sair youth killed by Israeli forces. “We are now working ahead to try and figure out a way to expand it.”
Sair village, located in the southern occupied West Bank district of Hebron, has been one of several epicenters of violence since the start of upheaval in October. Since then, residents say the village has been blockaded by Israeli forces more often than it’s been open.
The blockades have sometimes taken place after Palestinian youth were shot dead during alleged, attempted or actual attacks against Israelis, but other times the closures seem random, residents explained, with no connection to any known action by anyone in the village.
Read more: http://mondoweiss.net/2016/08/palestinian-explains-explosion/