Scars on Middle East landscape bear witness to past peace failures via farrellreporter and Ronen Zvulun
Thousands of words and millions of dollars will likely be expended at the U.S.-led conference on June 25-26 aimed at boosting the Palestinian economy, as the first phase of President Donald Trump's long-delayed peace plan gets under way.An abandoned mosque in the Golan Heights, in territory that Israel captured from Syria and occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
Since the end of British Mandate rule and the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, invasions, wars, armistices, treaties, uprisings, barriers, checkpoints and civil wars have shifted the boundaries of who can travel - and live - where.. Golan Heights, ISRAEL. Reuters/Ronen ZvulunIn the far north, on the western edge of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, a decades-old rusting Syrian tank can still be seen lying upside down in a whitewater stream.
"It’s surrealistic," said Daniel Alonim, 54, as his friends played Scrabble atop the hulk. "Like it fell from space."Amiram Efrati, from nearby Kibbutz Dan, fought in a June 1967 battle against half a dozen Syrian tanks that had advanced on Israeli positions from the then Syrian-held Golan. One of the tanks opened fire in a dry wheat field, he recalls.
Across the Golan are other reminders of the 1967 and 1973 wars between Israel and Syria: minefields, foxholes and abandoned armour. One former Syrian building bears Arabic graffiti reading "The Syrian army passed by here".The British army arrived in 1917 and left in 1948, when British rule ended. As they departed, neighbouring Arab countries invaded, and Jordanian forces captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
But on Jerusalem's Ammunition Hill, a memorial preserves the old Jordanian trenches and fortifications, on a site originally built by the British.Buildings constructed during the British Mandate era to serve as jails and fortified positions are seen in Al-Jiftlik village near Jericho, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
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