JERUSALEM, February 21, 2016 (WAFA) – Israeli bulldozers predawn Sunday demolished an elementary school and seized all its contents in Abu al-Nawwar Bedouin community, east of Jerusalem, according to one of the Bedouin locals.
Local Abu ‘Imad al-Jahalin told WAFA that around 30 Israeli military vehicles, accompanied by over 130 soldiers, stormed the Bedouin community during the predawn hours, and proceeded to demolish Abu al-Nawwar elementary school, comprising six classrooms for first and second graders, and seized all of its contents, including students ‘desks and chairs.
He noted that the school, which was built through European funding, is the sole elementary school in the community.
He added that Israeli occupation aims to empty the community of its indigenous Palestinian population for the benefit of settlement expansion, including its ‘E1’ settlement plan.
According to a PLO negotiation affairs Department press briefing issued on February 2016, “The foundations of the colonial enterprise labelled ‘E1’, targeting the Eastern Jerusalem Governorate, were laid in 1999.”
The PLO department noted that the E1 plan is one of the most ‘alarming and critical schemes’ carried out by Israel, noting that it has ‘increasingly become dire under the extremist right-wing Netanyahu government.’
“If implemented, the ‘E1’ colonial enterprise would exclude Jerusalem from any final status settlement and consolidate the ‘greater Jerusalem – eternal capital’ program of successive Israeli governments, including the current Netanyahu government.”
It stressed that the danger of the ‘E1’ zone lies in the fact that it fragments the land of Palestine and blocks territorial contiguity between the north and south of the West Bank.
“According to the master plan that was approved in 1994, around 5000 housing units, 10 hotels, industrial and commercial zones will be built in ‘E1’ zone, which will entail the confiscation of 12.5 square-kilometers from the land of [Jerusalem’s] al-Tur, al-Issawiya, and al-Eizariya.”
The department explained, ‘for the purpose of expanding its settler-colonial enterprise and emptying Jerusalem of its indigenous population, the Israeli government has stepped up its systematic onslaught against Palestinian Bedouin communities’.
T.R.
