Gush Etzion residents and Women in Green members were called to respond to an Islamic tree uprooting incident in Netzer, which sits between Elazar and Alon Shvut in Gush Etzion.
The uprooting was perpetrated just before Hoshana Rabbah at the end of the Sukkot festival. Local residents and activists arrived and replanted the land that night.
Women in Green co-chairwomen Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar explained to Arutz Sheva: "Those are lands that we planted after the Gush Katif expulsion. We were busy there for eight years safeguarding lands that the Arabs were trying to take over, and in the end we had a big victory a couple of years ago, in 2014 when the lands that we were planting on were declared official state lands, which enabled in 2018 the government to build a whole neighborhood there for the Nativ Haavot people who were uprooted.
"But a couple years ago, when it was already declared official state land, around five years ago, that's exactly when we started Oz vGaon as a Zionist response to the murder of the three boys. So the area in Netzer was taken over by people in Elazar, who created a program called Family Ten, that every family receives an area outside of Elazar where they're responsible for the upkeep of that area and to make sure that no Arabs come to uproot," Katsover and Matar related.
