Jordan Valley, July 15, 2015
(WAFA) - Israeli forces Wednesday conducted wide-range military drills across
the Jordan Valley area, according to a local official.
Head of Wadi Maleh village
council, Aref Daraghmeh, told WAFA that forces were deployed across different
parts of the Jordan Valley area, where they conducted military training.
The Israeli army often conducts
drills in the occupied West Bank, especially in the Jordan Valley, after
forcefully displacing dozens of local Palestinian families due to the proximity
of their homes to the training sites.
Palestinians living in these areas
have to also worry about unexploded ordnance left behind by the Israeli army
after the drills, which have led to the death of many Palestinians, including
children, over the past years.
In 2014, three Palestinians were
killed by unexploded ordnance left by Israeli forces in the West Bank's Jordan
Valley, while Gaza remains plagued with unexploded ordnance following the most
recent Israeli aggression.
On May 1, Jordan Valley
Solidarity, a network of Palestinian grassroots community groups, petitioned to
the UN, international embassies and international NGOs to pressure Israel to
stop its regular military exercises in the northern Jordan Valley.
“This training will devastate the
communities of Humsa Fouqa, Ibziq and Ras ar Ahmar and all of the surrounding
area once again,” said the group.
Israel is planning to annex the
Jordan Valley into a completely Israeli area, primarily in agriculture,
targeting to ban territorial contiguity between a future Palestinian state and
the rest of the Arab world.
In May 2014, a senior Israeli
commander admitted that training exercises in the occupied West Bank involve
live fire and are used to drive local Palestinian residents off their land.
Israeli Colonel Einav Shalev, an
operations officer in the Israeli military’s central command, admitted using
the tactic during a subcommittee meeting of Israel’s parliament in April 2014.
The revelation, reported media
sources, was a 'rare official acknowledgement of a measure that critics have
long decried as part of a deliberate policy by the Israeli authorities to force
Palestinians out of their land.'
T.R.
