The Israeli occupation plans to alter Jerusalem’s demographic composition by ethnically cleansing its indigenous Palestinian population in various ways, foremost among them is home demolition policy.
In its weekly report, the Palestinian National Bureau for Defending Land and Resisting Settlements pointed out the Israeli occupation army knocked down a record number of Palestinian houses in occupied Jerusalem this year.
Since the start of this year, the Israeli occupation authorities have demolished 129 Palestinian housing units in occupied Jerusalem, breaking the previous record of 123 set in 2016, according to the report.
Citing a human rights group, the report highlighted two reasons behind the surge in Palestinian home demolitions by the Israeli occupation government.
For more than 20 years, the report added, the Israeli occupation authorities have not approved any plans for Palestinian neighbourhoods in Jerusalem.
“Most Palestinian families in Jerusalem have no chance of getting building licenses the natural rate of population growth,” the report continued.
The second reason for this spike is putting Amendment 116 to the Planning and Building Law into effect late in 2018, under which Palestinian Jerusalemites were forced to self-demolish their homes under the pretext of being built with hard-to-obtain permits.
On the contrary, the Israeli occupation authorities have continued to build further settlement units and increase the number of Israeli settlers living in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, particularly in Hebron, the reported pointed out.
The Israeli occupation government has approved plans to build more than 12,150 new settlement units on occupied Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of this year, according to an anti-settlement advocacy group, the highest annual number since it began keeping records in 2012.
Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land are illegal under international law.
On December 2016, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2334 calling for ending the illegal settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and stressing that it “constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and has no legal validity.”
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