GENEVA (Dispatches) – United Nations rights experts called Monday on the world community to act to stop a dramatic surge in the Zionist regime’s “systematic and deliberate” demolition of Palestinian housing.
In the month of January alone, Zionist regime authorities reportedly demolished 132 Palestinian structures across 38 communities in the occupied West Bank, including 34 residential structures, the three independent experts said in a statement.
The Special Rapporteurs for rights in the Palestinian Territory, the right to adequate housing and the rights of internally displaced people, said the demolitions marked a 135-percent increase compared to January 2022.
The figures are based on those of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“The systematic demolition of Palestinian homes, erection of illegal Israeli settlements and systematic denial of building permits for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank amounts to ‘domicide’,” they said.
In late 2022, the Special Rapporteur on the right to housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, called for “domicide” — defined as the massive, arbitrary destruction of civilian housing in violent conflict — to be recognized as a crime under international law.
“Direct attacks on the Palestinian people’s homes, schools, livelihoods and water sources are nothing but Israel’s attempts to curtail the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and to threaten their very existence,” the experts said in Monday’s statement.
The experts, who are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, reiterated their concern over the situation in the occupied West Bank’s Masafer Yatta villages.
They warned that more than 1,100 Palestinian residents there remained at “imminent risk of forced eviction, arbitrary displacement and demolitions of their homes, livelihood, water and sanitation structures.”
Meanwhile, the Zionist regime’s far-right cabinet has decided to “legalize” nine settler outposts in the occupied West Bank in sheer defiance of the outcry from the international community and Palestinians who want an end to the regime’s settlement projects.
Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist cabinet announced the decision on Sunday, retroactively authorizing the outposts that had been already set up by Zionist settlers over the past years without the regime’s so-called approval.
The retroactive authorization of the outposts marks the first such step to be taken by the regime’s new cabinet, which took over in late December featuring a combination of hard-right and ultra-Orthodox parties.
The Israeli premier has described expansion of the regime’s settlements as his cabinet’s top priority in order to buy the extremist parties’ loyalty.
However, the international community, views the settlements -- hundreds of which have been built across the West Bank since the occupation of the territory in 1967 -- as illegal due to their construction on the occupied territories.