WEST BANK (Dispatches)
– Zionist regime authorities have notified the Municipal Council of Khirbet A’tuf of the plan to destroy a 400 acre nature reserve and uproot 30,000 trees in an area to the southwest of Tubas.
Moataz Bisharat is responsible for monitoring settlement activity in the occupied Jordan Valley. He told Wafa news agency that the notice was only found in the nature reserve on Monday.
It was dated 6 October, which suggests that the Zionist occupation authorities had no real intention of advising the local Palestinians of the plan, and were intending to just turn up on the day with bulldozers.
According to the head of the Municipal Council, Abdullah Bsharat, the trees which the regime is going to destroy were planted by the council and the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture with funds from international donors.
The Jordan Valley is a fertile strip of land running along the west bank of the River Jordan. It is home to about 65,000 Palestinians, and makes up approximately 30 percent of the total area of the occupied West Bank. Almost 90 percent of the West Bank has been designated Area C under full military and civilian control.
In another flagrant defiance of international outcry against settlement expansion and land grab policies in occupied Palestinian territories, Zionist authorities have approved plans for the construction of hundreds of new settler units in the northern part of Al-Quds.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that the so-called Al-Quds Local Planning and Building Committee on Monday gave the green light for plans to build the units on Palestinian-owned lands in several neighborhoods.
The plan aims to make radical changes to the infrastructure in the settlements, linking them to the regime’s so-called Greater Al-Quds Project and the light rail system.
Emboldened by former U.S. president Donald Trump’s all-out support, the Zionist regime has stepped up its illegal settlement construction activities in defiance of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which pronounced settlements in the West Bank and East Al-Quds “a flagrant violation under international law.”
Much of the international community regards the settler units in the occupied lands as illegal.
More than 600,000 Zionists live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Al-Quds.