BETHLEHEM, Saturday, March 06, 2021 (WAFA) – Israeli occupation authorities issued today a military order expropriating 658 dunams of Palestinian land in the village of al-Ubeidiya, located about 4 kilometers east of Bethlehem city in the south of the occupied West Bank, according to the Jerusalem-based Applied Research Institute (ARIJ).

ARIJ said the land confiscated by the arbitrary Israeli takeover decision will be used for a water collection project that will only serve the colonial Israeli settler communities in the area.

There are over 700,000 colonial Israeli settlers living in Jewish-only settlements across the West Bank in violation of international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention which expressly bans the relocation of the occupying nation's civilian population to the land of the occupied.

According to Israeli rights group B'Tselem, Israel has used a complex legal and bureaucratic mechanism to take control of more Palestinian land in the West Bank.

The principal tool used to take control of land is to declare it "state land." This process began in 1979 and is based on a manipulative implementation of the Ottoman Lands Law of 1858. Other methods employed by Israel to take control of land include seizure for military needs, declaration of land as "abandoned assets," and the expropriation of land for public needs. 

M.N