WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that he has instructed his staff to prepare plans for building a new neighborhood in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
According to a statement issued by the Prime Minister's Office, the planned neighborhood in the settlement of Dolev will include about 300 new residential housing units.
Netanyahu claimed the move comes in response to a deadly Palestinian bombing attack on Friday, which claimed the life of a 17-year-old Israeli girl and wounded her brother and father.
"We will deepen our roots and strike at our enemies. We will continue to strengthen and develop settlements," he said.
A senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) censured Netanyahu’s plan to build the settler units in the occupied West Bank as "irrational colonial escalation.”
"Corrupt Netanyahu proves that his extremist populist approach in his electoral race has no limits, and for that end, he is willing to wage wars and blow up the entire region,” Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO's executive committee, said in a statement released on Monday.
She then accused Netanyahu of trying to win votes of settlers by stealing Palestinian land and resources in violation of international law.
Ashrawi further noted that such colonial behavior has been progressive and systematic ever since the occupying regime was formed back in 1948, and is based primarily on the policy of ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, theft of land, resources and property, and the breach of international law and regulations, with the full political, legal and financial support of the United States.
"It is time to impose sanctions on Israel, and to hold it accountable for its deliberate violation of international law and resolutions in addition to humanitarian principles and values,” she concluded.
More than 600,000 Zionists live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds.
The UN Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in the occupied territories in several resolutions.