NO school is without challenges, but there will be few schools with the challenges faced by Burin Secondary School for Boys, 10 miles from Nablus in the West Bank.

When I spoke to the school’s headteacher Ibrahim Amran, he described in his calm and measured manner how at 11am on August 27 2014, four days into the autumn term, 10 Israeli soldiers entered the school firing tear gas and stun grenades.

To ensure Amran attended to them, they fired a sound bomb into his office before telling him that they had come to arrest some of his pupils. When he refused the soldiers access, they started to fire rubber bullets.

“The pupils were in lessons when the soldiers arrived,” he told me. “They tried to enter the classrooms but the teachers had locked the rooms with the boys inside. They ordered me to evacuate the school but I refused, saying I would evacuate the building once the soldiers had left.”

Parents from the village came to support the teachers and, after altercations with soldiers in the playground, the army departed and the boys were sent home.

At 4am the following morning, eight soldiers arrived at Amran’s home. They blindfolded and handcuffed him and took him to the Israeli army base outside Burin.

There they told him that boys from the school had been throwing stones from the playground at settler cars on a road leading up to the settlement of Yitzhar which overlooks the village on the southern side.

The road is situated about a quarter of a mile from the school premises. Amran denied categorically this was the case, at which point the soldiers warned him that if the stone-throwing did not stop, they would wreck the contents of his house and he would be sent to prison.

Amran told me that this had been the fourth army attack on the school so far in 2014. On each occasion, they had alleged stone-throwing by his pupils.

When not attacking the school, the army orders Amran to close the school once or twice weekly. Settlers from Yitzhar also come to the school to harass the pupils by aiming their guns and shouting at the boys over the playground wall during morning break.

“Soldiers are usually present,” he said, “but they just chat with the settlers.”

On the same day as the attack, the army also paid a visit to a primary school in Burin where they threw tear gas grenades into the playground, again alleging stone-throwing at a settler car. Subsequently, a number of children had needed medical attention.

Following my visit to Burin Boys’ School, I went to speak with Ra’ed Sejjar, leader of Burin council.

He explained that the school, together with a newly opened mosque opposite, are situated in Area C, covering more than 60 per cent of the West Bank and which, in accordance with the 1993 Oslo Accords, is administered by Israel.

On the other hand, the rest of the village lies in Areas A (administered by the Palestine National Authority) and B (administered jointly by the PNA and Israel). The Israeli government plans to take the land in Area C for military and settler use.

So on February 23 this year, the Israeli occupation authorities issued military order No T/03/14 to confiscate the land for “security needs” and to build a military watchtower near the school — which they did during the summer of the same year.

The new mosque, disliked by the settlers who objected to the sound of the call to prayer, would be demolished. Currently there is a court case pending about the future of the mosque and the land on which it is built. Amranbelieves the occupation authorities hold similar plans in relation to the boys’ school.

Burin received the order on March 10, seven days after the expiry date for filing objections. The order sets December 31 2016 as the final date for the Israeli army to implement its plan.

Attacks and harassment against the pupils at school constitute just one of many ways in which the lives of Ibrahim’s pupils and their families are affected by the Israeli army and settlers.

They suffer nightly army incursions and house raids in the village together with road blocks up to three times a week when Burin is designated a “closed military zone.”

During my two-week stay in Burin with a group from Britain accompanying and assisting farmers, we experienced three army road blocks.

We met Muntaser, aged 24, called to help his brother who had been arrested at a road block outside the village in July. He remonstrated with a soldier when no reasons for the brother’s arrest were forthcoming, at which point he was shot through the leg at close range. After being detained for an hour, bleeding profusely, an ambulance was called.

A soldier warned him that the next time he confronted soldiers, he would be killed.

The army came to the village most nights, sometimes breaking into homes in the early hours of the morning to make arrests. On one occasion they arrested Musharaf, a 19-year-old who was the breadwinner for his parents and six siblings.

The soldiers entered the house while the family was asleep. Before being taken away, Musharaf was not allowed to dress or even put on his shoes. As is the case with all arrests, family members had to contact the Red Cross to discover where he had been taken.

Sejjar described the situation for the villagers: “We are living virtually under a curfew. In bed at night we hear the soldiers entering the village firing guns. Children wake up and start to cry. When the soldiers enter our homes, they usually kick down the door, wreck our possessions and beat up people. There have been 12 arrests so far this year. Our normality is the violence perpetrated by the Israelis — both soldiers and settlers. We try to teach our children how to live with it.”

Unlike the settlers, Palestinians live under military law. The Israeli army considers stone-throwing by Palestinians to be such a serious offence that their courts sentence them to prison for months, sometimes years. This includes children and young people.

However, when settlers throw rocks, stones and sometimes Molotov cocktails at houses in the village and break windows, doors, burn cars or steal or harm animals (which happens on average once a week), they do so with impunity. It is Palestinians who are arrested for confronting them.

One villager, Muntaser Najjar, was fined 5,000 shekels (over £800) for throwing a stone at a settler who was assaulting his neighbour during a settler attack in the village.

During March 2014, despite an army presence, settlers from an outpost of the settlement of Brakha, to the north of Burin, repeatedly stoned Palestinians who were building a new agricultural road in Area B of the village, a project funded by the European Union and agreed by the Israeli civil and military authorities. Houses in the area were also stoned.

There were no sound bombs, tear gas or stun grenades, or arrests. However, the military did stop the Palestinians from completing the road, which remains unfinished.

Neither are settlers arrested for destroying olive trees or crops – the main source of income for most villagers. During the past year, over 300 trees on village land were burnt down. While I was in Burin, settlers set fire to 170 trees in an olive grove on land just outside the village. Videos taken by the villagers show soldiers are usually present at these attacks, but they just stand by and sometimes appear to be chatting with settlers.

Of course, in general, soldiers will reflect the expectations of the society in which they were raised and trained, but perhaps an additional factor accounting for the attitude of the military can be explained in part by the finding that more than 13 per cent of company commanders in the Israeli Defence Force are settlers, most of them from the settlement of Eli, located to the south of Nablus, not far from Burin.

This information was published in 2010 by an Israeli army magazine, The Camp. The percentage of recruits who are settlers has yet to be revealed.

The virtual impunity of settlers was confirmed in a report published in November by Yesh Din, an Israeli civil rights organisation.

Yesh Din had monitored 1,045 files opened by the Israeli police in the occupied West Bank between 2005 and April 2014, following complaints made by Palestinians, assisted by Yesh Din, about settler attacks to persons and property.

Just 7.4 per cent of these complaints led to an indictment. Between 2013 and 2014 the figures were even worse: — of 159 complaints, just 2 per cent led to charges.

Burin, with 35 complaints, had the largest number of all the occupied West Bank (though by no means all villagers lodge complaints) and by April 2014, just one conviction had been made.

Meanwhile, the settlers gain in confidence. Recently they left leaflets near the village claiming that Burin belonged to them as originally it had been a Jewish village.

How do the villagers view the future? Despite the constant threats, attacks and destruction of property from both the army and the settlers, most people stoically strive to live normal lives. However some young people do leave — according to Sejjar, about 20 had left in the past year.

Adnan, aged 24 and unemployed, brought to my attention the fact that within the village, there are people who receive large payments to spy for the military, so the problems are unlikely to go away. Others, like Amjad, a local grocer, are equally pessimistic: “In 100 years time we’ll still be discussing the violence and injustices being committed against us,” he said.

However, many view the situation differently. Mahmoud, a recent graduate in civil engineering and who is engaged to be married, told me how he and his future wife will be living in Burin. They would prefer to support and teach their children to deal with the situation in the village rather than bring them up elsewhere.

Laji, a literature student who works part time in a different grocers shop told me how his family had lost nearly 17 acres of land to settlers and the army as well as hundreds of trees.

The day we spoke, they had just discovered another 25 trees which had been cut down and burnt by settlers. “We will plant more trees on our remaining land,” he told me, “and if they destroy the new trees, we will plant more, again and again. We are staying here. It’s our land. We won’t let them take it from us.”

Jenny Kassman is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a signatory to Jews for Justice for Palestinians