Yihya Kurdi (46), a father of three, grew up in Burin and lives in Qalqiliyah. His family owns two plots of land in Burin, one of them adjacent to his childhood home on the eastern side of the village. After the second intifada began and the Huwarah Checkpoint was installed about a kilometer away, the family decided to sell the house and move to Qalqiliyah, but kept the plot.
There are about 45 olive trees in the plot, which consists of four dunams [1 dunam = 1,000 square meters]. The family's second plot has 50 olive trees and consists of two dunams, about 100 meters south of the first plot.
On 12 October 2020, a village resident noticed a settler harvesting olives in one of the plots and sent Yihya Kurdi a photo documenting him.
As the settlement of Har Bracha and the outpost of Sneh Yaakov (Givat Ronen) were established nearby, the military forbids the family to enter their land without prior coordination. This year, the military allowed them a single day for harvesting, on 25 October 2020. When they got to the first plot, they discovered settlers had already harvested 30 of the 45 trees. The remaining 15 yielded about 30 kilos of olives. They also found that settlers had set up a fence around the second plot to block their access to it.
In a testimony he gave B’Tselem field researcher Salma a-Deb’i, Yihya Kurdi recounted:
At around 9:00 A.M., I arrived at my plot with my two sons, Yazan (16) and Muhammad (13), and saw eight soldiers there. One of them asked me, in good Arabic, if I had the deed for the land. I answered that I didn't have the papers, but that my brothers and I own the land. He said the land belongs to a friend of his from Givat Ronen. After I told him that wasn’t true, he pointed to the northern part of the plot and said we weren't allowed to go beyond the road.
We have 45 olive trees on that land, as well as two houses the family has owned since the 1970s – long before the settlements were built. In the second plot, south of there, we have 50 olive trees. I was surprised to find that settlers put up a barbed wire fence around it.
The soldiers said we weren't allowed into the second plot or into part of the first plot, so we could only harvest 15 trees, five or six of which barely had olives on them.
We worked until 3:00 P.M. and picked about 30 kilos of olives, which are enough for about 10 liters of oil. I photographed the trees with the broken branches and we went home. Before the second intifada broke out, we would extract about 20 jerricans of oil from the two plots (more than 200 kilos of olives). Now we're supposed to get even more, because the older the trees, the more fruit they bear.