HERMESH, West Bank, (Islamweb & Agencies) - The roughly 200 residents of a tiny internationally illegal Jewish settlement in the northern West Bank are now openly admitting that they are scared. Some are seriously planning to leave.
"Nobody here can tell you he is not scared," says Eli Pasternak, a 30-year-old electrician who is married and has a 10-year-old daughter. "I'm scared."
The roads leading to the northern settlements have become alleys of blood as Israeli vehicles make easy targets for Palestinian snipers hiding in the hills above -- or following in cars for an ambush. (Read photo caption below).
Five settlers have been killed by Palestinians since a would-be ceasefire came into effect in mid-June, three of them in ambushes on the roads; and of the 120 Israelis killed since the intifada began, 31 were settlers.
Palestinians see the settlers, many of them among the most hardline Israelis when it comes to the Palestinian conflict, as the backbone of Israel's ongoing occupation of Gaza Strip and West Bank land.
Hermesh secretary Nati Meytal says 10 out of the roughy 50 families at the settlement have relocated in the past four months, trading in their pretty house and garden for a simple flat in the towns of Hadera or Netanya.
But Pasternak says he feels safer at Hermesh than he would in the coastal town of Netanya -- itself a site of regular Palestinian attacks very close to the occupied West Bank.
"I can live here only if the government has an agreement with the Palestinian Authority that gives us security," he says.
The Council of Settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which gathers the roughly 200,000 settlers living in around 150 settlements on land Israel has occupied since 1967, says it has no precise figures on the number that have left since the intifada began.
In some settlements, around 20 percent of residents have left since the intifadha began.
Shimon Avraham, mayor of the Mevo Dotan settlement which is home to 76 families and about 450 residents perched on a West Bank hilltop, says eight families have left since the late-September beginning of the uprising.
A Mevo Dotan resident, Zvi Shelef, was killed in a Palestinian ambush on May 31.
Travel to the "Green Line," the border between Israel and the West Bank, now means travelling under military escort -- and all trips down the killing roads are limited to only essential trips.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Israeli occupation soldiers stop a truck at a temporary occupation army checkpoint July 3, 2001 near the Jewish settlement Sussiya in the West Bank to protect settlers taking part in a funeral service for a slain settler who was shot and killed the previous evening by Palestinian assailants. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause