On a wide area covered with green plants throughout the year a green forest is located in the town of Siris in the northern governorates of Nablus and Jenin whose residents dream of recognizing it as a natural reserve in order to attract official and community attention.
The village of Siris is located to the southeast of the city of Jenin about 22 km away from the city center. The population is more than 6000 people according to the Palestinian Statistics Department.
It has an area of about 12495 dunums of which about 2500 dunums are state land 7500 dunums are planted with olive trees 1500 dunums are hills and the rest is used for construction.
The citizens of the town are proud that the reason why the village is named Siris is because of its many crops. This reflects the large number of farms and agricultural fields and produce especially olives in addition to the surrounding green hills which are full of oak and cypress trees.
According to the head of the local council of the village of Saris Shehadeh Samara the area of the Siris’s reserve is more than 2000 dunums all of which are planted with old trees more than hundreds of years old and have been an attraction for hiking throughout several months of the year.
“Unfortunately in the early 1990s during the outbreak of the intifada the area was exploited by wood traders who uprooted hundreds of trees but in the recent years trees were re-cultivated again” he said.
He stressed that the region attracts hundreds of families from neighboring villages in the spring where they spend their time enjoy the beauty of the Palestinian environment thus the village deserves to be recognized by official bodies as a natural reserve so as to attract more visitors and interested people.
The village council also hopes that animals would be brought to the reserve so that a functioning open zoo is established there as was the case before.
Hossam Abu Mariam the mayor of Siris said that classifying the village as a natural reserve is an important and vital project to do not only for the town but also for the entire region noting that he submitted a funding proposal for more than one party and is still waiting for approval.
At the entrance to the village a 200-year-old tree stands there as one of the citizens says as if it bears a lot of memories of old houses and palaces inside the town along with the surrounding communities such as Khirbet Abu Ali Khirbet Othman and Khirbet Al-Rumman.
It also highlights the beauty of the Omari Mosque in the town which was restored while retaining its interior design and minaret that could be climbed through an old staircase. There is also an ancient tomb inside the mosque which is said to be the tomb of Sirin a Muslim religious leader.
The villagers tell a story that Prophet Ibrahim passed through the area when he left Iraq and lived besides seven large trees that existed near Siris before continuing his journey to Hebron but these trees disappeared as time passed.
It is said that the Muslim leader Saladin passed from the village and took it as a headquarters for his forces but more recently Egyptian leader Ibrahim Pasha has passed through the village during his conquests of the Levant in the 19th century and lived there after he failed to storm the nearby village of Sanur. Siris was also one of the stations of ancient Umayyad convoys.
