Anees Suheil Barghouti
July 04, 2018•Update: July 04, 2018
JERUSALEM
Israeli forces on Wednesday demolished a Palestinian Bedouin community near East Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.
“Military bulldozers, backed by Israeli forces, stormed the Abu al-Nawwar Bedouin community at dawn and demolished ten Palestinian homes and livestock barracks,” Daoud Jahaleen, a spokesperson for the community, told Anadolu Agency.
He said the community is home to 687 Palestinians, 65% of them are children.
In February, Israeli bulldozers razed the only school in the Bedouin community, which is surrounded by two Israeli settlements, Ma'ale Adumim and Kedar.
For years, the Israeli government has tried to dismantle the Abu al-Nawwar community to make way for its massive E1 settlement project in East Jerusalem.
On Tuesday, the UN decried Israeli plans to demolish the community of Khan al-Ahmar Abu al Helu, another Bedouin community near Jerusalem.
Israeli authorities seek to expel some 10,000 Bedouin residents of the E1 zone, which sits on roughly 15 square kilometers of land northeast of Jerusalem to build Jewish-only residential units linking Jerusalem to the Ma’ale Adumim settlement.
The planned Israeli building in E1 will effectively cut the West Bank into half and prevents the territorial contiguity of a future Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.
International law views the West Bank and East Jerusalem as occupied territories and considers all Jewish settlement building on the land to be illegal.
