WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Zionist troops have handed over orders to Palestinian farmers in the village of Battir on the outskirts of Bethlehem, giving notice that troops will be razing their farms to the ground and destroying their grapevines, Anadolu has reported.
The occupation army’s pretext for the destruction is that the vines are being planted in Area C, which is under the security and administrative domination of the Zionist regime. According to activist Omar Al-Qaisi, though, the vines were planted five years ago.
Area C takes up 61 percent of the area of the occupied West Bank. The regime won’t allow the building of any Palestinian facilities there or the cultivation of any land without a license from the occupation authorities, none of which are ever issued.
Palestine has strongly rejected and boycotted the regime’s so-called settlement project in the occupied Al-Quds as a colonization attempt, warning that the scheme is aimed at annexing the Arab part of the holy city to the occupying regime.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), led by President Mahmoud Abbas, unanimously decided on Sunday to scrap and prohibit the “Israeli political settlement project” in the occupied al-Quds, Palestine’s official Wafa news agency reported.
It stressed that the so-called scheme constituted a dangerous part of the regime’s colonization project aimed at ultimately annexing the Arab part of Al-Quds to what Tel Aviv calls “the unified capital of Israel.”
The East Al-Quds, “with its sanctities and heritage, is the eternal capital of the State of Palestine in accordance with the resolutions of international legitimacy and international law,” the statement by the office of Abbas stressed.
It added that a higher committee would be launched to follow up on this critical issue in a bid to preserve the unified Palestinian position, and in order to eliminate the risks caused by its implementation.
The statement further warned that the dangerous project would allow Zionist regime authorities to finally seize Palestinian properties in Al-Quds under the so-called “Absentee Property Law”, which would change the city’s legal character and lead to its “Judaization.”
Palestinians want the occupied West Bank as part of a future independent Palestinian state with East al-Quds as its capital.