Hebron, Tuesday, January 28, 2020 (WAFA) – Israeli  military today issued a military order to  seize hundreds of dunams of Palestinian farmland in the southern West Bank district of Hebron, according to local sources.

Hasan Breijieh, an anti-settlement and wall activist, told WAFA that he received a copy of an Israeli military plan to expand the borders of the illegal colonial settlement of Asfar, built illegally on lands belonging to Ash-Shuyukh and Sa‘ir, both located to the north of Hebron city.

Breijeh added that the plan entails the confiscation of tens of dunams of Palestinian farmland planted olive and almond trees in basin No. 8 in al- Ash-Shuyukh town and basin No. 20 in Sa‘ir for the expansion of the colonial settlement.

According to the Israeli anti-settlement group, Peace Now, “Over the years, Israel has used a number of legal and bureaucratic procedures in order to appropriate West Bank lands, with the primary objective of establishing settlements and providing land reserves for them.”

“Using primarily these five methods: seizure for military purposes; declaration of state lands; seizure of absentee property; confiscation for public needs; and initial registration, Israel has managed to take over about 50% of the lands in the West Bank, barring the local Palestinian public from using them.”

There are almost 834,000 Israeli settlers living in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The number of settlers has almost tripled since the Oslo Accords of 1993, when settlers’ number estimated 252,000. Illegal colonial settlements have leapt from 144 to 515 in that time.

Israel’s nation-state law, passed in July 2018, enshrines Jewish supremacy, and states that building and strengthening the colonial settlements is a “national interest.”

K.F.