Middle East Monitor / May 11, 2022
A new road for illegal Jewish settlers has been built by Israeli occupation forces in a Palestinian village near the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem, reported Wafa news agency.
The road, adjacent to the illegal Jewish settlement of Tzur Hadassah, runs through the Palestinian village of Wadi Fukin to the west of Bethlehem.
Ibrahim al-Horoub, head of Wadi Fukin village council, said the road is 300 metres long with barbed wire placed on both sides of it to prevent Palestinians from entering.
Bethlehem cities, villages and neighbourhoods have been subject to increasing Israeli theft of land in favour of expanding illegal Israeli settlements.
It comes after the Israeli Ministry of Defence said last week it would approve the construction of some 4,000 settlement units in illegal Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank. Meanwhile, authorities also approved the demolition of Palestinian homes in 12 villages in Masafer Yatta.
Professor Michael Lynk, the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said Israel’s control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip amounts to apartheid.
“With the eyes of the international community-wide open, Israel has imposed upon Palestine an apartheid reality in a post-apartheid world,” Lynk said in a report published in March.
“In the Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967, there are now five million stateless Palestinians living without rights, in an acute state of subjugation, and with no path to self-determination or a viable independent state which the international community has repeatedly promised is their right,” he wrote in an advance copy of his report.
“The differences in living conditions and citizenship rights and benefits are stark, deeply discriminatory and maintained through systematic and institutionalized oppression,” the report said.
