Israeli Decision to Deport Palestinians from West Bank Villages Racial Discrimination

Days of Palestine – Hebron

An international human rights organization has lambasted the Israeli regime’s decision to deport over 1,300 Palestinians from their villages near Hebron in the southern part of the occupied West Bank in favor of Israeli settlers.

According to a Saturday report by the Palestinian Information Center, the Geneva Council of Rights and Freedoms described the measure as “a stark example of Israel’s policy of racial discrimination.”

The regime’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Palestinians’ expulsion from the area, which is known as Masafer Yatta and comprises a collection of Palestinian villages, on Wednesday. Taking the decision the court rejected the Palestinians’ arguments that they had lived there before.

Israeli occupation began attempts to expel the Palestinians in the early 1980s, prompting a legal battle against them that lasted for two decades.

The campaign saw the regime declaring most of the area as “a closed military training zone,” something that the Palestinian residents denounce as a “pretext for seizing their land.

The Geneva Council said in its statement that the expulsion of the land’s inhabitants from their homes and the seizure and transfer of land to settlers amount to forced displacement, and were tantamount to a war crime under the rules of international law.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, said in a Saturday statement that Israel’s plan to build 4,000 settlement units in occupied West Bank and demolish around 12 Palestinian hamlets in Masafer Yatta amounted to ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinians.

The movement said, “Approval of the settlement plans and the displacement of thousands of Palestinian residents is a grave escalation and an appalling encroachment on the occupied Palestinian territories.”

Hamas noted that Israel’s crimes and policies against the Palestinians, their lands, and holy sites will neither grant the regime any legitimacy nor bring it security.

The resistance movement added that Palestinians will continue to defend their lands and holy sites at all costs until they liberate them and regain all their rights.

“The international community must assume its responsibility by supporting the just Palestinian cause and ending the Israeli settlement activity, which violates the international laws and conventions and poses a threat to the region, in addition to the world peace and stability,” Hamas concluded.

Israeli regime officials hope to advance the illegal settlement project before an expected visit by US President Joe Biden to the occupied territories at the end of June.

During Biden’s visit, the Tel Aviv regime plans to host a meeting of the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain, who normalized their ties with Israel under US-brokered deals known as the Abraham Accords, in addition to Egypt and Jordan.

The US envoy to Israel, Thomas Naides, said he and other Biden administration officials have made it clear to Israeli officials several times in the last two weeks that the administration is opposed to the construction of new settlements and asked Israeli authorities not to move ahead with it.

Between 600,000 and 750,000 Israelis occupy over 250 illegal settlements built since the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds.

Palestinians want the West Bank as part of a future independent Palestinian state, with East al-Quds as its capital.

The last round of Israeli-Palestinian talks collapsed in 2014, with Israel’s continued settlement expansion emerging as a key sticking point.

All Israeli settlements are deemed illegal under international law as they are built on the occupied land.

The UN Security Council has time and again condemned the occupying regime’s diabolic settler-colonialism project in its umpteen resolutions.

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