CAIRO (Dispatches) – Secretary-General of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, has warned, that the Zionist regime’s violations in the occupied Palestinian TERRITORY are escalating in a manner that could lead the situation to explode right before the international community’s sight.
Aboul Gheit stressed, during his opening remarks at Union for the Mediterranean conference held Thursday, that “the emerging global crises should not overshadow the problems and crises afflicting the Arab region, on top of which is the Palestinian cause, which cannot be ignored or marginalized, as the Palestinian people suffer from a regime of Occupation that can only be described as apartheid.”
The remarks came as Zionist settlers vandalized Palestinian vehicles and sprayed racist graffiti on Friday in the towns of Abu Ghosh and Ein Naqquba, west of Al-Quds.
Several Palestinian cars were burned and their tires slashed by a group of settlers in a string of attacks by a group known as Price Tag.
Four vehicles in Ein Naqquba and four others in Abu Ghosh were set ablaze by settlers.
On Thursday, the Zionist occupation troops launched a number of armed incursions across the occupied West Bank and Al-Quds, arresting a number of young Palestinian men, amid ongoing illegal settler attacks on Palestinians and their property in Nablus and Al-Khalil.
Zionist troops arrested thirteen Palestinians who were taken away for interrogation, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club. They face charges of participating in acts of popular resistance against the violence of the settlers and the occupation forces.
The arrests come in reaction to the double bombing in which one Zionist settler was killed and nearly a dozen injured in occupied Al-Quds, in what some Israeli analysts said could be the beginning of a third Intifada.
Media reports said that other armed incursions took place in the town of Azzun in the Qalqilya district, and Husan in the Bethlehem governorate.
Montaser Abu Rumaila, a Palestinian boy was also arrested after being assaulted by security forces near the Karantina checkpoint in Al-Khalil
Meanwhile, Palestinian medical sources reported that two women were injured as a result of settlers attacking Palestinian homes in Khirbet Beit Iskaria, which is surrounded by the illegal Gush Etzion settlement bloc. Gangs of settlers also attacked Palestinian homes in the Kasara area, south of Al-Khalil.
Meanwhile, Zionist regime authorities have approved plans for the construction of hundreds of new settler units in the central part of West Bank, irrespective of the international outcry against the Zionist regime’s land grab policies in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Palestinian Information Center reported that the units will be built in Efrat settlement, located 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) south of Al-Quds, at the expense of illegal confiscation of Palestinian-owned lands south of Bethlehem.
The report added that the plan also includes the establishment of a new settlement with 7,000 units in Bethlehem.
Earlier, the regime’s supreme court had thrown out an appeal submitted by Palestinians to prevent the settlement expansion plan, which will seize 1,200 dunams (296.5 acres) of land in Khallet al-Nahla area of Wadi Rahal village, south of Bethlehem.
Moreover, the Palestinian Wall and Settlements Resistance Commission said Zionist regime authorities had given the green light for the expropriation of Palestinian lands near the central West Bank city of Salfit.