WEST BANK (Dispatches) –
Protesters have formed a human chain, blocking the road leading to the occupying regime’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in protest at controversial “legal reforms” that have been planned by the premier’s extremist cabinet.
The protest saw the attendants creating the roadblock using their bodies as well as pipes and chains.
They managed to obstruct the road for some time until the police intervened with pipe and chain cutters, separating the human chain, and arresting the protesters.
The protests came after the Zionist regime’s parliament approved the first reading of three bills that are part of the so-called reforms.
The plan serves as the centerpiece of the policies of the Netanyahu-led cabinet, which he cobbled together late last year by wooing ultra-Orthodox and hard-right parties.
The reforms seek to enfeeble the regime’s supreme court by robbing it of the power to strike down either the cabinet or the legislature’s decisions.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians resistance movement Hamas strongly denounced the approval of the bill by Israel that enables settlers to return to areas of the occupied West Bank evacuated in 2005, saying the move amounts to an all-out war against Palestinians.
The movement said in a statement that the bill aims to Judiaze Palestinian lands, noting that Palestinian youths will certainly confront it with more resistance.
Hamas further urged the international community to prevent such measures by the Zionist regime, which are a clear violation of international law.
It also called for an immediate action to stop the regime’s occupation and aggression against Palestinians and their holy sites.
Britain and a dozen other EU member states also condemn the Zionist parliament’s approval of the bill.
In a joint statement on Monday, the UK and the EU countries, including France, demanded that the occupying regime halt the looming dispossession of several Palestinian families from their homes in East Al-Quds.
They declared their “strong opposition to Israel’s settlement expansion policy” and sternly warned about the forced evacuation of Palestinian families from the Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah neighborhoods in East Al-Quds.
“It is very worrying that Israeli authorities intend to continue demolishing Palestinian houses in the occupied West Bank and East Al-Quds during the [Muslim holy] month of Ramadan,” the statement read.
In 2005, then Zionist prime minister Ariel Sharon enacted a law requiring unilateral withdrawal from the besieged Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank, and the removal of 25 illegal settlements in the two areas.
Twenty-one settlements in Gaza have already been removed and 8,000 settlers have been evacuated. In the occupied West Bank, four illegal settlements were evacuated but the structures in them were maintained and the areas were labeled closed military zones.
The Zionist regime has already authorized new settlement outposts and pledged to construct new settler units in the West Bank.
More than 600,000 Zionists live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Al-Quds.
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 under international law and the Geneva Conventions due to their construction on the occupied territories.