policies that led to the denial of accessing quarries, many workers were forced to leave Beit Fajjar in order to find new jobs to survive. “I’m 52 years old and I have a big family. I don’t have much work these days. I used to work for al-Atlas Company in Beit Jala. For 12 years, I have worked in these kinds of quarries and factories. But now, I am hardly getting any work. The quarries are located in an area called Khirbet Heji, which is in Area C. The quarries in this area are supposed to send stones to the factories. However, the quarries have been affected by [Israeli] soldier raids where they confiscate our equipment. Because of this, there’s hardly any work in the quarries or factories. In 2014, Israeli soldiers started raiding the quarries on a daily basis. They were saying that the quarries are theirs but the land doesn’t belong to Israel. Palestinians from Beit Fajjar own it. We used to work two or three days a week there and of course, we’d be really scared of the Israeli army coming. They would come to the area and attack us and we would have to run away and leave our work. We started working at night to avoid soldier attacks but that didn’t help at all. They started coming at night too. In the end, we just had to stop working; there was no way for us to keep on working. The quarries are the foundation of all the work. The crushers and the factories depend on the quarries. If we can’t bring stones from the quarries then nobody else can work in the town. Everything is connected to the quarries. Personally, I don’t have any other source of income. I had to sell the only piece of land that I had just to feed my children. I had to sell my land at a really cheap price because I was desperate. Someone who is my age, and has all the health problems that I have, won’t be able to find another job. Nobody wants to hire someone like me; who wants to hire a sick old man? People want to leave this town and look for alternatives and other jobs but we have no options. Where should we go to? Even if they want to work in Israel, they won’t give work permits to people who are not married. The situation is really hard. There are honestly no options for the youth in this town. I personally know five young men who left a few weeks ago to search for jobs and I don’t know if they will ever come back. This town has one important natural resource which is stones; people used to call our town “the town of the white gold.” Israel has a policy of denying people access to the stones. Their goal is to starve Palestinians and make them submit to anything they want; they want to make us hungry so we will get out of this town.” H. Taqatqa, Beit Fajjar. Interview: 9 February 2017 52