JERUSALEM, October 20, 2025 (WAFA) – Israeli forces today demolished a Palestinian-owned farm near the town of az-Za'ayyem, east of occupied Jerusalem, under the pretext of being built without an Israeli-issued permit.
The Jerusalem Governorate said in a statement that Israeli bulldozers demolished a farm belonging to a Jerusalemite resident identified as Farouq Mustafa in the Rawabi Al-Issawiya area, near az-Za'ayyem, citing construction without a permit.
The landowner, Mustafa, said in the statement that Israeli forces, accompanied by bulldozers, stormed the farm and demolished a 150-square-meter tin shack and a 100-square-meter agricultural canopy. They also leveled the fence surrounding the eight-dunum plot, causing extensive damage to the farm.
The Governorate condemned this act as part of the occupation’s accelerated colonial settlement policy aimed at implementing the E1 colonial plan, which seeks to empty Palestinian lands east of Jerusalem and annex them for the benefit of colonial settlement expansion.
This, it stressed, would further isolate the city from its Palestinian surroundings in the West Bank and undermine the establishment of a geographically contiguous Palestinian state.
The said plan puts around 7,000 Palestinians, residing in 22 communities across the Jerusalem desert area, at risk of forcible displacement.
In August, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the approval of plans to construct 3,401 housing units near the colonial settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, along with 3,515 additional units in the surrounding area.
Smotrich said the plan would link Ma’ale Adumim with Jerusalem and sever Arab territorial continuity between the governorates of Ramallah and Bethlehem.
According to the United Nations, colonial settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal and undermines the prospects of a two-state solution.
The Israeli human rights group Peace Now previously described this plan as essentially fatal to the prospect of a two-state solution because it divides the West Bank into two – a northern and a southern region – and prevents the development of the central Ramallah-East Jerusalem-Bethlehem metropolis in the West Bank.
T.R.
