(MENAFN- Jordan News Agency) Ramallah, Nov 28 (Petra) –– Israeli occupation forces demolished or seized 129 Palestinian buildings in the West Bank and East Jerusalem this month, under the pretext they were constructed without a license.
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the United Nations (OCHA) in Palestine said that the demolitions and confiscations had led to the displacement of 100 people, and caused damage to at least 200 others.
The largest of these incidents took place on November 3 in Hamsa Al-Buqaia, where 83 residences were razed, displacing 73 people, including 41 children, OCHA said in a report.
It said Israeli bulldozers also demolished 30 buildings in 12 other population centers in Area C, which accounts for about 60 per cent of the occupied West Bank, and is under the complete control of the occupation authority.
The other 16 incidents were documented by OCHA in East Jerusalem, which occurred after the occupation authority resumed demolitions in the city after a three-week suspension due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the report.
During the past months, the Israeli occupation forces have, in an unprecedented way, escalated home demolitions in the West Bank and Jerusalem, it said.
Human rights organisations repeatedly complained that the occupation forces restrict Palestinian construction at a time of escalated settlement activity in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
"The Israeli occupation government continues ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, and plans to whitewash dozens of settlement outposts in the West Bank," according to the weekly report by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's National Office for the Defense of Land and Resistance of Settlement.
It said that an Israeli court in Jerusalem last week dismissed an appeal by Palestinian families who have lived since 1963 in a building in Batn al-Hawa in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, which means that 30 families, including 12 children below the age of 18, will be evicted, in addition to a fine of 600,000 shekels that the Dweik family, which filed the lawsuit, will have to pay.
The report pointed out that the Israeli court, based on a petition by the settler group Ateret Cohanim, had ruled for the eviction of the 87 Palestinian residents of the neighborhood within two weeks.
SS
28/11/2020 18:06:44
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