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The Samaritans (Hebrew: שומרונים Shomronim, Arabic: السامريون as-Sāmariyyūn) are an ethnoreligious group of the Levant. Religiously, they are the adherents to Samaritanism, an Abrahamic religion closely related to Judaism. Based on the Samaritan Torah, Samaritans claim their worship is the true religion of the ancient Israelites prior to the Babylonian Exile, preserved by those who remained in the Land of Israel, as opposed to Judaism, which they assert is a related but altered and amended religion brought back by the exiled returnees.
On 8 November 2001, during the second intifada (uprising), Joseph Cohen, a 56-year-old Samaritan, was driving home from the Palestinian town of Nablus.
"When I was almost home, I came across two Palestinian boys and they shot me," he says. "The blood ran from me like water."
He lost control of his car and drove into an Israeli roadblock. The Israeli soldiers shouted at him to stop.
"But I couldn't stop the car. And so they also shot me."
There are probably few people in the world who have been shot by both Palestinians and Israelis within minutes of each other.
But, as Mr Cohen says, "this is a short story of our problem."
In the 1920s their numbers dropped to just over 100 and it was predicted that they would die out.
The community was struggling with birth defects because of their tradition of marrying other Samaritans, and they were not open to new converts.
But some now say that to survive, they must open up to outsiders.
Mr Cohen tells me that since there are many more men than women, they have to look outside their own community to find potential wives.