Israeli occupation accelerates settlement building operations in West Bank

Since the beginning of this year, the Israeli occupation has announced plans to build 13,000 settlement units in occupied Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and the rest of the West Bank areas, which resulted in confiscating wide areas of Palestinian land that aimed at displacing the Palestinians and imposing new facts on the ground to complete implementing the occupation’s colonialist settlement expansion scheme.

The National Bureau for Defending the Land and Resisting the Settlements said in its weekly report on the Israeli settlement expansion, published on Saturday, that the announced 13,000 settlement units represent the double of what used to be announced during the same period of the past years.

The report warned that with the decision of Netanyahu’s government to grant the minister Bezalel Smotrich wide authorities to accelerate settlement building operations in the West Bank, the number of settlement unites will increase continuously which will lead to more land confiscation.

The report said that last week, Netanyahu announced a plan to establish 1,000 settlement units to expand a settlement already built between the villages of Al-Sawiya, Al-Laban Al-Sharqiya and Qaryut in Nablus, which confiscate an area of more than 3,318 dunums.

Last week also, the report added, the occupation established seven settlement outposts in several West Bank areas.

Meantime, the Israeli settlers escalated their terrorism against the Palestinians throughout the past week by attacking several villages in the West Bank and setting fire to 30 houses in Turmus’aya village, and to many vehicles and shops, the report went on to say.

This settler crime received angry international reactions. Representative of the European Union in the occupied Palestinian territories Sven Burgsdorff described the settlers’ aggressive practices as a terrorist attack and called for putting an end to the attacks of the Israeli occupation forces and settlers against the Palestinians, and for the perpetrators to be held accountable.

In addition, the Representative of Ireland to the State of Palestine Don Sexton said “Israel” must provide an answer for the ongoing escalation in the West Bank, while the British consul in Al-Quds Diana Corner said that Britain is following up on what happened in Turmus’aya and other areas. “These events constitute an unprecedented increase in the settler attacks, which is unacceptable and must be stopped and perpetrators must be held accountable,” she stressed.

Hamda Mustafa