HEBRON, Thursday, October 31, 2019 (WAFA) – Israeli forces distributed a notice to Palestinians informing them of its plan to seize 3,000 dunams of Palestinian farmlands to the east of Yatta in the southern Hebron district.

Mayor of Masafer Yatta Nidal Younes told WAFA that Israeli occupation authorities handed him a military order to seize approximately 3,000 dunams of Palestinian land, extending from Khirbet Mneizel village to the tent encampments of al-Jahalin tribe on the outskirts of the Dead Sea.

Abdul-Hadi Hantash, a cartographer, that the Israeli military previously issued an order in 1996 to seize approximately 250,000 dunams in the southern Hebron, noting that this order was a part of the larger 1970 Allon Plan, which articulated Israeli proposals for colonizing the Palestinian occupied territories.

The plan advocated concepts which have been central to Israel’s colonization policies since 1948. The plan’s guiding principle was to allow Israel to annex as much territory as possible with a minimum of Palestinian inhabitants.

According to the Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights (BADIL), the plan envisaged that Israel secure a belt of land along the Jordan River, 12-15 km from west to east and widening to 18-25 km in the southern West Bank (and possibly including Hebron). At its middle, this belt would link up with an enlarged Jerusalem. The 1970 version of his plan recommended that Israel annex a somewhat larger belt than originally proposed. The Allon Plan envisaged Israeli annexation of some 40 percent of the West Bank.

K.F.