Palestinians in Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood in occupied Al-Quds continue to resist the Israeli occupation’s ethnic cleansing and Judaization plans

The Palestinians in the neighborhood of Batn Al-Hawa in the town of Silwan in occupied Al-Quds continue to resist the Israeli occupation’s attempts to uproot and displace them from their lands with the purpose of implementing its Judaization plan in the holy city by obliterating its features and falsifying its history.

700 Palestinians are facing the threat of displacement from this neighborhood, which is adjacent to Al-Aqsa Mosque from the southern side. The occupation forces and Israeli settlers storm the neighborhood on a daily basis and brutally attack its residents. They demolish the locals’ houses or  seize them in order  to place settlers instead. The aim is to cordon off Al-Aqsa with a settlement belt, tighten the siege on the Old City of Al-Quds and isolate it from the rest of the city’s neighborhoods and towns amid the deadly silence and inaction of the international community over these violations which amount to crimes against humanity.

 A spokesman for the locals in Silwan town Fakhri Abu Ziab told SANA correspondent that since 1948, the Israeli occupation has seized wide areas of the neighborhood’s lands and established 12 settlement outposts that turned the lives of its locals into hell in order to force them to leave their houses, but, he reiterated, this will never happen and that the Palestinians will not leave their houses and land and will not allow the occupation to end their presence in this area and obliterate their identity even if it costs them dearly.

On his part, Director of Wadi Hilweh Center Jawad Siam affirmed that the occupation’s plans to displace dozens of Palestinian families from the Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood comes within the framework of its scheme to establish a settlement belt extending from Batn al-Hawa to the Al-Bustan neighborhood, where the occupation plans to demolish 84 houses, and passing through the Wadi Hilweh neighborhood towards Sheikh Jarrah arera, thereby, surrounding Al-Aqsa Mosque and the old town from the southern side with settlements. 

Siam emphasized that what is happening in the neighborhoods of the Old City of Al-Quds in terms of Judaization, settlement building, displacement and excavation, aims at changing the cultural and historical Arab features of Al-Quds geographically and demographically. He called on freedom-loving peoples of the world to support the people of Al-Quds in their battle against the occupation’s Judaization and settlement building schemes, which constitute a flagrant violation of all international laws and resolutions.

Hamda Mustafa