المكتب الوطني للدفاع عن الارض ومقاومة الاستيطان منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية
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By: Madeeha Al-A’raj
The Israeli Occupation PM Netanyahu decided to build 1,000 new settlement units in the Eli settlement, as his office justified the decision as a response to an armed Palestinian attack at the entrance of the settlement, where 4 settlers were killed, adding that the decision came after Netanyahu and Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, agreed on that, as well as Minister of Occupation Army, Yoav Gallant, who didn’t oppose it. Netanyahu knows that he is lying as the decision was not so, but an excuse to expand the Eli’s settlement that was approved by his government in 2014, under the title of ‘Administrative Measures.’ The confiscation of lands in the villages of Al-Sawiya, Al-Laban Al-Sharqiya, and Qartiot in Nablus, was part of a plan to build 640 settlement units that was delayed by the Israeli Supreme Court at the time, after the Israeli B’Tselem Association and the Bimkom Foundation submitted citizens’ petitions against the plan to confiscate more than 1000 donams, 24% of which registered as a private owned land.
The Eli settlement was established in 1984, in the middle of the villages of Al-Sawiya, Al-Laban Al-Sharqiya, and Qariot, on 3,318 dunums. It includes the most dangerous military college for the preparation and rehabilitation of soldiers before joining the occupation army. This means that the occupying power is planning to transform the settlement of Eli into a settlement center, and then transform it with its outposts into a settlement bloc in the extension of the Ariel bloc on the lands of the Salfeet Governor to ensure settlement linking of Tel Aviv on the Palestinian coast with the Palestinian Valley, which means tearing the Palestinian contiguity between a number of Palestinian governorates in the north and the center.
Within the context of consolidating the alliance between Netanyahu and Smotrich to ensure governmental stability in Israel, Netanyahu gave the green light to his extreme right-wing government to approve last week a decision that allows shortening the process of obtaining building permits in settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, allowing the building of more settlement units, expanding existing settlements, and leveling and legalizing outposts, essentially without the approval of the political level at every stage of it.
This means that the approval of the political level is no longer required to submit construction plans to the Supreme Council for Planning and Building, neither at the stage of filing nor at the stage of verifying projects. Instead of the approval of the Israeli Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense on each of the planned steps, which includes 4 or more different approvals and years of discussions, the initial approval of the planning permit will be under the authority of the Minister of Occupation Army, Bezalel Smotrich, according to what was stated in the coalition agreement when forming the government between the Likud and the Religious Zionist Party, which gives Smotrich and his supporters among the leaders of the settlement councils, the ability to promote settlement expansion and establish new settlements without control.
All that comes within the coalition agreement between the Likud and the Religious Zionist Party led by the Minister of Finance and the Minister in the Occupation Army, Bezalel Smotrich, which obligated Netanyahu to promote a policy according to which Israeli sovereignty would be applied on what Israel calls ‘Judea and Samaria’ i.e. the occupied West Bank.
According to the agreement, Smotrich appoints civilians to official positions in the military government, such as, deputy head of the Civil Administration and legal advisors to its officials, as well as being solely responsible for designing Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank and deciding on issues of land allocation, planning and construction in most areas outside cities and villages, enforcing law on illegal construction by both Palestinians and Israelis; infrastructure ; water and others, besides, expanding the dual legal system in the West Bank ‘civilian justice for settlers and military justice for Palestinians’ through legislation passed by the Knesset that applies to Israeli settlers, while Palestinians remain subject to military law. In other words, Smotrich now has the power to advance settlement plans in a way that deprives the Palestinians from accessing to water, land, infrastructure, and getting aid from international organizations and agencies.
In accordance to Israeli statements, the Netanyahu’s government has approved the construction of 13,000 settlement units within 6 months. This is an annual average of twice the number of approvals, compared to previous years in which Netanyahu was also prime minister during the administration of former US President Donald Trump, who was fully supportive of Israel.
Moreover, the Supreme Planning Council announced its plans to build 4,560 housing units in the West Bank, including 390 units in Beitar Illit, 340 in Ma’ale Adumim, 371 in Eli, 330 in Halamish, 287 in Adora, and 264 in Etz Ephraim, 196 in Telem, 184 in Migdalim, 152 in Matsad, 150 in Hashmonim, 120 in Kiryat Arba, 104 in Kernish and Mron, and 98 in Ariel and Mevo Dotan. Besides, the council will submit for final approval building plans in the settlements of Givat Ze’ev 787 housing units, Arvava 381, Elkana 343, Carmel and Hermash.
Within the context of the weekly violations, this report sheds light on the terrorist practices of the settlers against the Palestinian countryside from Turmusaya town, Barqa, Hawara, Buin, and Asira al-Qibliya in the north to Sinjil, Turmusaya, and al-Mughayyir in the center, passing through the Bedouin camps in Al-Ma’rajat and besieged communities in the Jordan Valley, to Beit Ummar and Masafer Yatta in the south. We noted that ministers in the Netanyahu government and Knesset members are touring the Palestinian countryside carrying matches to light more fires, as does Ben Gvir, who joined the sit-in at the end of the week at the ‘Avitar’ settlement outpost on Mount Sabih, Beita inciting the sit-down to occupy more hills and the establishment of more outposts and setting more fires in Palestinian villages and towns. The occupied West Bank witnessed a bloody week as a result of hundreds of attacks launched by Jewish terrorist organizations, which take safe havens from the settlements and outposts under the auspices of the far-right and fascist government and with the protection of the army.
Such attacks bring to mind the ‘Kristal Night’ in Hawara, which took place last March, in the darkness of the night, dozens of homes, facilities, vehicles, and areas of agricultural land were burned and others were damaged, at the hands of hundreds of armed settlers, protected by the occupation forces, while Turmusaya in the Ramallah Governorate was living the same scene, but in broad daylight, in a clear indication that settler violence is not a transient phenomenon, but rather an organized terrorist act, which emerged from the limited circle of secret cells into the space of armed gangs and terrorist militias, which began to take on new forms. An organization led by neo-Nazis in Israel such as Smotrich, Ben Gvir, his advisor Govstein and Yossi Dagan, and plays the role assigned to it in carrying out criminal acts that the Israeli army does not want to do, but it is done under its full protection. In the town of Turmusaya, the young Omar Hisham Qateen Jabara, 27, died of a bullet wound to the chest fired by one of the occupation soldiers, during a large-scale attack launched by about 400 settlers from “Shilo” built on the citizens’ lands on the town in broad daylight at a time when it contains 30 houses and more than 60 vehicles for burning at the hands of settlers.
For his parts, representative of the European Union to Palestine, Sven Kun von Burgsdorff arrived to the town headed a delegation from the European Union countries, described the aggression launched by the Israeli occupation soldiers and settlers as a ‘terrorist attack against the Palestinians who are safe in their homes’. He carried out such actions to ensure that they would not be repeated in the future under any form. He stressed that “this land is occupied and does not belong to any other party, regardless of the classification of areas A, B, and C.
In Jerusalem , the Netanyahu government prepares to carry out a number of settlement projects that were kept in the drawers, and to expand the settlements surrounded the city, it has also recently prepared a project for construction in the ‘Kedmat Zion settlement’ on the lands of Jabal Mukaber, whose Palestinian population exceeds 23,000 in Deir al-Sunna area, classified by the occupation municipality as part of Ras al-Amod, knowing that the project got preliminary approvals, and it is about t be approved next August.
The project includes the construction of 384 settlement units in the first stages on an area of 79 dunums that can be expanded to reach 1,200 units and public facilities, public institutions and facilities that include Jewish schools, kindergartens, two synagogues, a center and a public leadership headquarters. The occupation authorities and the municipality of Moshe Aialon claim that about 45% of the land allocated for settlement expansion is under the supervision of the so-called ‘Custodian of Absentee Property’, while the remaining 55% of the land is claimed by settlers, as is customary, under old ownership contracts before 1948.
According to the project, a number of houses in the area inhabited by Jabal Al Mukaber families are awaiting demolition based on the settlers’ old ownership claims. The scheme of the project, which involves a clear policy of ethnic cleansing, has opened the doors of confrontation between Palestinian citizens and the occupation authorities and municipality since the beginning of this year when it called the people of this region for a general strike, which included schools and the commercial sector, thus, the confrontations pushed the population, especially the Arab As-Sawahra and the youth movement in Al-Makbeer to call for a comprehensive strike and civil disobedience at the end of last January, and a complete closure of the entrances to the mountain with obstacles, and the pouring of oil on the roads to prevent the incursions of the occupation forces in protest against those decisions announced by the fascist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, to begin demolishing the homes of Palestinian citizens in the region, which is estimated 600 units in Jabal Al Mukaber alone, under the pretext that they have no permits to build them. Ben Gvir and the mayor of Al-Ikhtal are planning not only to expand the settlement, but also to transfer the ‘Oz’ police station located near the nearby settlement outpost ‘Nof Zion’ to a suitable place in Jabal Mukaber on Palestinian lands to facilitate the work of the Israeli police forces and enable them to reach Jerusalemite Neighborhoods, such as, Jabal Mukaber and Sor Baher and others.
The question isn’t limited to the city of Jerusalem, but extend to the other governorates that are also targeted by activity and settlement expansion, sometimes in the form of building new settlement units, and at other times in pastoral farms, and a third in what Israel calls industrial zones, the latest of which is the plan to build an industrial zone on hundreds of dunums of land.
The lands of the village of Safa in the Ramallah and Al-Bireh governorate, where the occupation bulldozers began working last week to bulldoze large areas of the citizens’ lands in the Khallet Khalifa, Batin Hassan, Al-Talqat and Al-Mrouj areas, after confiscating them for the purpose of establishing an industrial zone, where the bulldozers caused huge destruction in the village lands for the benefit of the settlement project that robbed 400 dunums of its lands, which connects Gaza with the West Bank, and the occupation replaced it with the settlement St. 443, which was built on the lands of Safa, Beit Sira and Beit Oor, and forbids the villagers from using it.
As for Safa village, it has about 15,000 dunums, only 6,000 dunums left after the occupation seized 9,000 dunums. At the same time, the settlement plans extend to the villages of Nablus governorate the main road between Ramallah and Nablus, which are the villages of Al-Mughayyir, Turmusaya, Jalud, Qaryut, Duma, Qusra, all the way to Beita. Its extensions form a link between the Jordan Valley and the interior occupied in 1948, and between the north, middle and south of the West Bank, with the aim of isolating and controlling it, with the aim of fragmenting the West Bank, and turning it into isolated ghettos that can be controlled over every part of it by simply erecting checkpoints or military gates.
In parallel to settler attacks during the last week, 7 settlement outposts were established with the knowledge of the political level, including the Israeli PM Netanyahu. They, under the protection of the occupation forces stormed the village of Um Safa, northwest of Ramallah and set up tents over its lands. A new settlement outpost near the Bedouin residences in the middle of the Al-Ma’rajat road west of Jericho, specifically the lands known as “Mount Qa’am.” Others started building 55 new settlement units in the “Saleit” settlement in the Jordan Valley, and a new settlement outpost near the settlements of Arab al-Ka’abneh in the Baqa’a area, east of the village of Mikhmas, northeast of Jerusalem. Hundreds of settlers, including leaders in the settlement movement and members of the ruling coalition went to the Evitar outpost and called on the government to approve the construction of a permanent settlement in the place of whom member of the Knesset of the “religious Zionist” party Zvi Sukkot, the head of the Samaria Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, and the Chief Rabbi of Samaria, Eliakim Levanon.
Thus, Israel is obliged under international law to prevent any aggression that is carried out by settlers, and to defend and protect the Palestinian citizens as an occupying power, and to bring anyone who attacks their safety to justice so that he receives his punishment.” In turn, the representative of the Republic of Ireland to the State of Palestine, Don Sexton, said, “Israel is required to have many answers as an occupying power, and it is responsible for what It happened’. While the British Consul General in Jerusalem, Diana Corner, said, ‘Britain is following up what happened in Turmusaya and other areas, and all these events constitute an unprecedented increase in the volume of settler attacks, until they have become today on a daily basis, and all of them are unacceptable attacks, and the aggressors must be held accountable’, while the US ambassador, Tom Nedis, said, ‘We monitor settler violence, and it must stop.’
