JENIN, June 11, 2015 (WAFA) – Israeli forces Thursday raided and wreaked havoc in a Palestinian-owned shop used for selling construction material in the village of Zobda to the west of Jenin, according to the shop owner.
The owner, Yehya Tawfiq, told WAFA that Israeli forces raided his shop, for the second consecutive time, where they disabled the surveillance cameras before they broke down the main front door and wreaked havoc in the shop in a provocative manner for no apparent reason.
The owner submitted an official complaint through the Palestinian military liaison office.
He said forces target Palestinian shops located at the entrance of the village almost on daily basis.
Israeli forces often target Palestinian properties or provide protection to settlers conducting attacks on Palestinians in an aim to force them to leave their land for the benefit of settlement expansion.
According to the Palestinian Information Center, “Israel routinely targets the Palestinians' livelihood and their ability to make a living by burning their fields, destroying their olive groves, and violently seizing their farmland.”
Regarding the poor economic situation in Gaza, which deteriorated severally following Israel’s 2014 summer aggression, the center said that, “The Israeli occupation forces had deliberately destroyed the Palestinian economy in Gaza Strip by targeting factories and causing heavy losses to the commercial and agricultural sectors during the ongoing aggression on Gaza,”
Gaza's economy will take years to recover from the devastating impact of the war, in which more than 360 factories have been destroyed or badly damaged and thousands of acres of farmland ruined by tanks, shelling and air strikes, reported the Guardian on its website.
The continued Israeli siege has also severely limited the productivity of the industrial sector since it was imposed for the past eight years, forcing factories to close and to demobilize thousands of workers.
In the meantime, Palestinians’ homes and businesses in area C, under full Israeli control, are often targeted by Israeli forces, depriving Palestinians of their source of living under the pretext of being built without a permit.
Israel rarely issues construction permits to Palestinians, forcing many of them to embark on construction without a permit.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), between December 30, 2014 and January 12, 2015, the Israeli authorities demolished 27 Palestinian structures in Area C of the West Bank and five in East Jerusalem, in addition to two self demolition incidents, due to lack of Israeli-issued building permits.
T.R/M.H
