NABLUS, Thursday, February 13, 2020 (WAFA) – Israeli forces Thursday started the groundwork for the construction of a road that would connect colonial settlements in Nablus district with those in the Jordan Valley.

Ghassan Daghlas, who monitors settlement construction in the northern West Bank, told WAFA that Israeli forces started the construction of an 8-kilometer-long road that would connect the colonial settlement of Eli and Shilo in Nablus district with other colonial settlements in the Jordan Valley.

He noted that the road would be constructed on fertile agricultural lands belonging to the Palestinian villages of Duma, Talfit, Qaryout, and al-Mughayyir, all located south of Nablus, as well as to the villagers of Fasayel in the central Jordan Valley.

He slammed the road construction as one of the most serious projects aimed to seize more Palestinian land and restrict Palestinian movement.

In 2014, the Israeli government revealed a plan that aims to open dozens of settler-only by-pass roads that would extend for 300 kilometers.

Israel denies planning permits for Palestinians to build on their own land, extend existing houses to accommodate natural growth, and to build roads, particularly in Jerusalem and Area C, while it much more easily gives the estimated 550,000 Jewish Israeli settlers there building permits and provides them with roads, electricity, water and sewage systems that remain inaccessible to many neighboring Palestinians.

Israeli severely restricts Palestinians’ freedom of movement through a complex combination of approximately 100 fixed checkpoints, flying checkpoints, settler-only roads and various other physical obstructions.

Such Israeli measures, taken under the guise of security, are intended to entrench Israel’s 51-year-old military occupation of the West Bank and its settler colonial project which it enforces with routine and frequently deadly violence against Palestinians.

K.T./ K.F.