NABLUS,
Monday, August 09, 2021 (WAFA) – Israeli forces Sunday evening quelled an
anti-land-pillage protest in Beita town, south of
Nablus, causing injuries, according to medical sources.
Ahmad
Jibril, the head of the Emergency and Ambulance
Department at the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), said that Israeli
forces opened fire on the participants in the rally to disperse them, injuring one by a
rubber-coated steel bullet in the hand, hitting four others by canisters in the
head and causing some 50 others to suffocate from tear gas suffocation.
He added that another protestor sustained
injuries due to falling from a high place after being chased by soldiers.
The
residents of Beita and the surrounding villages have
been holding weekly Friday rallies to protest the construction of the new
colonial settlement of Givat Eviatar
atop Jabal Sbeih (Sbeih Mount) as well as the seizure of lands belonging to
the villagers of Beita, Huwarra,
and Za‘tara to inaugurate a new settler-only bypass
road.
Israeli
forces have used fatal violence to disperse the rallies, killing six
Palestinians from the town and injuring over 600 others in almost a month.
In
addition to Mount Sabih, Israeli forces have erected
another colonial settlement outpost atop Mount Al-Arma,
north of Beita, a few months ago, as both mounts
enjoy a strategic location as they overlook the Jordan Valley, a fertile strip
of land running west along the Jordan River which makes up approximately 30% of the West Bank.
Seizing
the two hilltops represents a panoptical defensive tool as they would grant the
Israeli occupation with a panoramic view over the Jordan Valley and the whole
district of Nablus. This is why the Israeli occupation authorities have
assigned them a place in its settlement expansion project.
The
construction of the two colonial outposts atop Mount Sabih,
south of Beita, and Mount Al-Arma,
north of the town, besides to a bypass road to the west is an Israeli measure
to push Palestinian villages and towns into crowded enclaves, ghettos, surrounded
by walls, settlements and military installations, and disrupt their geographic
contiguity with other parts of the West Bank.
The
number of settlers living in Jewish-only colonial settlements across occupied
East Jerusalem and the West Bank in violation of international law has jumped
to over 700,000 and colonial settlement expansion has tripled since the signing
of Oslo Accords in 1993.
Israel’s
nation-state law, passed in July 2018, enshrines Jewish supremacy, and states
that building and strengthening the colonial settlements is a “national
interest.”
K.F.