AL-QUDS (Dispatches) – The
Zionist regime’s Member of the Knesset Yair Golan have called settlers living in the illegal West Bank settlement of Homesh as “subhumans”.
The deputy economy minister and member of the left-wing Meretz party has come under attack for saying: “These are not people, these are subhumans, they are despicable.” “There should be no one there,” he continued in an interview. “When I commanded the Judea and Samaria [occupied West Bank] Division [of the army], I did not let anyone settle there.”
Settlers in Homesh face eviction. The land on which they have built their homes belongs to Palestinians from the village of Burka in the north of the occupied West Bank. Golan also slammed settlers for vandalizing Palestinian property.
“They do not mention that those people who come to settle there [in Homesh] riot in the [Palestinian] village of Burka, smash tombstones, carrying out a pogrom. We, the Jewish people who have suffered from pogroms throughout history, now enact pogroms against others.”
However, his criticism has led to calls for him to step down.
The remarks come as a local Zionist committee has approved plans to build more than 3,500 new illegal settler units in the occupied East Al-Quds, disregarding the international outcry over the occupying regime’s settlement construction and land expropriation policies.
The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now reported that the construction of the units would largely cut off the city from the southern part of the occupied West Bank, further complicating any efforts to create a sovereign Palestinian state.
One plan would build 1,465 settler units between controversial Giv’at Hamatos and Har Homa settlements, further cutting off East Al-Quds from the nearby Palestinian city of Bethlehem and the southern West Bank. Another 2,092 homes would be built elsewhere in East Al-Quds.
Peace Now said the plans “add to the tension on the ground” and highlight the “blatant discrimination” that the Zionist regime is building in East Al-Quds for settlers only, while “hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the city can build almost nothing,”
The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Al-Quds Affairs said in a report on Sunday that Zionist officials approved plans for the construction of thousands of new settler units and demolished dozens of Palestinian-owned buildings in occupied Al-Quds last year.
The ministry said Israeli authorities green-lighted a host of plans in order to build about 12,000 units in the contested holy city throughout 2021, while they razed 177 Palestinian residences there.
They also ordered demolition of another 200 homes in occupied Al-Quds.