Zavidovici to Jelah; 27th October

27th October

After packing up and enjoying a breakfast of leftover pasta and sauce, we went to visit the large stone sphere the fruit sellers had told us about the day before.

It was substantially bigger than the spheres we saw yesterday. I think it’s so big, and it’s been dug around to expose it, that it’s actually begun to crack as there is no earth to support its own weight, it seems, as cracks have been filled in with concrete in order to hold it together. Nonetheless a remarkable sight.

The road was quiet for most of the day. A couple of moderate climbs, on the second passing down a hillside which has had its forest largely cut down. Quite a few people enjoying their Sunday by walking through these hills to, enjoying the autumn leaves before they disappear.

Staying at the town of Jelah, at a BnB. We cooked a meal of chicken soup, eggs and rice.

I watched AlJazeer Balkans in the evening where they had a documentary about Israeli settler villages and the utter ruthlessness in which they evict Palestinians villages from their own homes.

The documentary followed BreakingTheSilence, an organisation set up and run by former Israeli soldiers who are raising awareness on the injustices they witnessed as part of their service. It went into detail on how Israeli settlers would cut off the water supply and destroy the toilets of Palestinian villages, in order to force Palestinians out, as without clean water and a sewage system, people cannot live -- then the Israeli settlers move in, and settle on the land.

I had heard of these settlements but didn’t know much about them — I guess things have intensified recently as the FT also ran an article on this same issue: How extremist settlers in the West Bank became the law (Archived here).

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