Palestinians losing land to expansionist Israeli settlements

By Anees Barghouthy

JERUSALEM

Since 1967 and the occupation of East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel has worked hard to build and expand settlements, both in terms of expanding their size and increasing the number of their inhabitants.

As result of this policy, there are now 250,000 Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank and another 350,000 live in settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, according to official Palestinian figures.

Hanna Issa, a Palestinian settlement affairs expert, told Anadolu Agency that there are 145 Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank built on more than 540,000 dunams of Palestinian land, with one dunam being equivalent to 1,000 square meters.

“The settlements are built in Area C, which is under the full control of Israel and constitutes 60 percent of the West Bank,” Issa said.

Through its settlements, Israel not only controls the surface area of the West Bank, but also the resources under its ground.

“Israel controls 91 percent of the water resources in the Palestinian territories and prevents Palestinians from digging or reclaiming artesian wells,” Issa said.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Israeli settlers take more than 50 million square meters of water from Palestinian water to cultivate the land seized by the Israeli occupation.

As for East Jerusalem, 350,000 Israeli settlers live in 32 settlements built within the boundaries of Jerusalem Governorate, according to official figures.

“Since 1979, successive Israel governments have sought to change the demographic reality in East Jerusalem and have largely succeeded in doing so,” Khalil Tufakji, another Palestinian expert on Israeli settlement construction, told Anadolu Agency.

“In 2015, around 185,000 Arab citizens compared to 230,000 Jewish settlers lived within the municipal boundaries of East Jerusalem,” he said.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It later annexed the holy city in 1980, claiming it, alongside the West Jerusalem, as the unified capital of the self-proclaimed Jewish state in a move that has never recognized by the international community.

Tufakji claims that Israel is implementing a plan to resettle one million settlers in the territories occupied in 1967.

“Israel emptied Jerusalem of its residents, and isolated it from its Arabic extension, declared the Jordan valley a closed military zone, confiscated thousands of dunams in the West Bank and is linking the coastal cities with the biggest settlement blocs in the West Bank by railway,” Tufakji said.

Since March last year, around 2,500 settlement units were built in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, alongside tenders for hundreds of housing units.

- Palestinians losing land to Israeli settlements

Alongside building a separation wall in the West Bank, Israel has also stepped up its policy of confiscating Palestinian land in the West Bank.

“In 2009, Israel confiscated 3,000 dunams of my land without warning,” said Mohammad Abu Qibtia, a Palestinian citizen from Yatta town, near Hebron, a city in the southern occupied West Bank.

“The Israeli army surrounded the land with a metal fence and prevented me from entering it under the pretext of security reasons,” he added. “They tried to buy it from me but I refused so they took it by force to build houses for their settlers.”

Riayd Abu Katb, from Aqraba village near Nablus, a city in the north of the occupied West Bank, asserted that the Israeli army confiscated his land under the pretext of being in a closed military zone.

“The handed me a military order confiscating my land to conduct military exercises,” he said. “They prevented me from reaching my olive trees, which is everything I own in this life.”

International law views the West Bank and East Jerusalem as "occupied territories," considering all Jewish settlement building on the land illegal.

Palestinian negotiators insist that Israeli settlement building on Arab land must stop before a comprehensive peace agreement can be reached.