Beita town south of Nablus city incurs heavy losses on a daily basis due to the closure of its main entrance since last Thursday. Beita residents considered this move part of the campaign waged against them by the Israeli occupation authorities to prevent any act of resistance.
Sources in Beita Municipality estimate that daily losses reach hundreds of thousands of shekels especially for merchants working in the town’s vegetable market not to mention depriving people of moving freely outside the town.
Beita Municipality director Awad Abu Amer told the PIC reporter that merchants of the vegetable market most of whom have prepaid deals and orders are the most affected for they bring their products by large trucks coming from the 1948 occupied Palestinian territories. The trucks cannot pass through the subsidiary roads so they turn back which inflicts massive losses.
Beita residents were surprised by concrete cubes installed at the town’s entrance by Israeli occupation forces accompanied by an announcement written in Arabic justifying that the move came to enforce security.
Abdulrahman Duwaikat resident of the town said that he is forced to go to Huwara to ride the bus that he used to wait for at the entrance of Beita town to travel to Ramallah city which doubled his daily fare.
Aisha Abu Hamdan a college student said that moving through subsidiary streets and farm roads is very risky due to heavy rain and accumulated floodwater which also impose threat on the movement of small cars.
This is the fourth time Beita entrance gets closed since January 2016. The entrance was previously blocked by sand barriers under the pretext that Israeli settlers’ vehicles were exposed to attacks by Molotov cocktails.
