WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says the Zionist regime is working against peace and security by killing and displacing Palestinians and building settlements on occupied land with the support of the "biased" United States.
"Killing, expanding settlement[s], destruction, and the uprooting of the Palestinian population will not bring peace or security," President Abbas said in a meeting with former Israeli left-wing lawmakers, Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
"This (Zionist) government's policies and the biased U.S. decisions contradict the international resolutions and are harming the chances of making just peace based on the two-state solution along 1967 borders," the president said.
Palestinian officials have long sought to establish an independent Palestinian state within the borders that existed before the 1967 war between the occupying regime and three other Arab states.
In that war — also known as the Six-Day War, the Zionist regime took over Arab and Palestinian land that it continues to occupy to this day. It has been expanding further into Palestinian land by building settlements for Zionists deeper and deeper into those territories, in what is effectively killing the chances of Palestinian statehood.
The Tel Aviv regime, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who hails from the hard-line Likud Party, has taken a radical shift to the far right, with cabinet members openly advocating the annexation of occupied Palestinian territories.
More than 230 illegal settlements have been constructed since 1967. In September 2016, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution — with a notable abstention vote by the then-administration of US president Barack Obama — that denounced Israeli settlements as a "flagrant violation of international law."
The regime also demolished a family home with several bulldozers in the Palestinian neighborhood of al-Nakheel in al-Ramla City, in central occupied territories on Sunday.
Heavily armed Zionist troops used many bulldozers and stormed Nakheel and declared it as a closed military zone, local sources reported.
According to sources, the Israeli Municipality of al-Ramla ordered the demolition of the family home belonging to Nayef Abu Amer, claiming that it was built without the difficult-to-obtain Israeli building permit.
They added that Zionist troops prevented residents of the Palestinian-owned home from accessing the area while the Israeli bulldozers carried out the demolition.
Since 1967, the regime has been enforcing the draconian policy of demolishing the homes of those Palestinians who are deemed by Tel Aviv to be behind fatal attacks against Israeli settlers. The practice, however, was temporarily halted from 2005 to 2014, with the exception of 2009, when scores of homes were sealed and razed in East al-Quds.