TULKAREM, Tuesday, May 5, 2020 (WAFA) – Israeli forces Tuesday issued notices to stop the construction of several Palestinian houses in Aqabah village, to the north of the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarm, according to WAFA correspondent.
She added that Israeli military vehicles stormed the village, where soldiers and officers of the so-called Israeli Planning Committee handed six villagers notices, ordering them to halt the construction of their houses.
The village mayor Tayseer Amarneh said that Israeli forces ordered a halt on these houses purportedly for being located in Area C despite the fact that the homeowners possess proper land ownership documentation.
The houses, some of which are already built and ready to be inhabited, are located at the village entrance and are one-kilometer away from the section of the Israeli unilaterally-built apartheid wall.
Israel has constructed a section of the apartheid wall, which encircles the village from three directions, confiscating and isolating some 4,050 dunams of fertile land for colonial settlement activities and pushing the villagers into a crowded enclave, a ghetto, surrounded by walls, settlements and military installations.
Israel demolishes Palestinian houses and structures almost on a daily basis as a means to achieve “demographic control” of the occupied territories.
Israel denies planning permits for Palestinians to build on their own land or to extend existing houses to accommodate natural growth, particularly in Jerusalem and Area C, which constitutes 60 percent of the occupied West Bank and falls under full Israeli military rule, forcing residents to build without obtaining rarely-granted permits to provide shelters for their families.
In contrast, Israel argues that building within existing colonial settlements is necessary to accommodate the “natural growth” of settlers. Therefore, 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.
K.T/ K.F.
