The iron resistance of one Palestinian hamlet to Israel's 'ring of steel' has caught the imagination of the world's media<
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"After four days of curfew, the village of Nilin is not a pretty sight. Torched cars lie strewn on the sides of the road, bedroom windows sport gaping bullet holes, and debris is scattered the length and breadth of the town: evidence of the brutality meted out indiscriminately by the army against the locals.
As I followed the trail of destruction, the tales of woe grew ever darker and ever more indicting of the Israel Defence Force's cruelty. "Look what they did to me!" screamed an elderly grandmother, hoisting up her robes to display the raw wounds inflicted by soldiers who had thrown her against a stone wall during a raid. She began sobbing as she recounted the events of earlier in the week, utterly bewildered as to how she had come to be mistreated so.
Upstairs, her middle-aged son clutched his two children to his side as he recounted the night the troops burst into his home.
"Imagine what it does to your son and daughter when they see you beaten by a soldier," Hillal Khawaja said flatly. He showed us the wreckage of a room that had borne the brunt of the military's ire: computers ripped from their sockets, beds smashed and furniture overturned, nothing had been spared the wrath of the marauding infantry.
Further up the road, a family pointed out the scorched linoleum in their kitchen and the shattered glass of their windows, the result of a random bullet and grenade attack launched by passing jeeps. "We were inches away from where the shells landed," said the father of the house, as his children looked on timidly. "If we had been any closer, we'd have had no chance."
Three residents weren't so lucky. The trio were hit with live fire during the incursion. All are still in hospital with the bullets still lodged inside them; one entered a man's spine, and it will be a miracle if he can walk again after surgery.
The psychological trauma is just as bad, with parents talking of children terrified to sleep in their family homes, convinced that the soldiers will come back, and turn their lives into teargas- and bullet-filled nightmares once more. However, one local activist, Hindi Mesleh, says: "Israel has occupied us for 60 years, and still we resist; four days more isn't going to stop us." He has been instrumental in the campaign against the construction of the separation wall through Nilin's land, and scoffs at the idea that the army can ever bring a halt to the villagers' protests.
His resolute spirit was evident amongst the entire town on Thursday, as hundreds of residents braved the ring of steel around them and took to the fields to demonstrate against the wall once again. The rally had been billed as a "monumental" gathering to mark the fourth anniversary of the international court of justice's Advisory Opinion against the wall, and scores of activists made it in through the barricades to swell the numbers marching determinedly through the olive groves."
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