Days of Palestine – Jordan Valley
In an attempt to steal Palestinian land, Israeli occupation settlers set up a tent and fenced off dozens of dunums of land in the Jordan Valley, Tuesday said Mahdi Daraghme, head of al-Maleh village council.
He said that over the past two days, settlers set up a tent and placed a fence around land in the Bayoud and Umm Kharoubeh villages in the northern Jordan Valley.
The settlers, he explained, have grabbed thousands of dunums of herding land in the Jordan Valley in order to prevent shepherds from reaching them and in order to eventually takeover this land.
Annexation of the Jordan Valley is the proposed application of Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley. The idea has been advocated by some Israeli politicians since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began in 1967, most notably with the Allon Plan and the 2019 Netanyahu plan.
According to B'Tselem, 65,000 Palestinians and about 11,000 Israeli settlers live in the area.
According to PeaceNow, the proposal includes 30 settlements with 12,778 settlers, 18 illegal outposts, 15 Area A and B communities, including 44,175 Palestinians and 48 shepherding communities in Area C including 8,775 Palestinians.
The area to be annexed is about 22% of the West Bank, 90% of which is in Area C and 20% of the land is Palestinian-owned.
On 10 September 2019 (a week before the September 2019 Israeli legislative election), Netanyahu announced his government's plan to annex the Jordan Valley, if it won the election.
The map that Netanyahu displayed of the area to be annexed had several errors, incorrectly noting the location of several settlements and omitting Palestinian villages.
Netanyahu said that he had received a green light from the United States' Donald Trump administration. The administration said that there had been no change in United States policy.
The next day, there was international condemnation of the proposal from Palestinians, the Arab league, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, the UK and the UN, the latter stating "..that any Israeli move to impose its administration over the Palestinian territory would be illegal under international law."
Several Israeli politicians from across the political spectrum and Hebrew media outlets described this announcement as a political stunt for votes. Most notably, Moshe Ya'alon, a Knesset Member from the Blue and White party, said that in 2014 Netanyahu agreed in principle to evacuate Jordan Valley settlements.
On Wednesday morning, 24 June 2020, at around 8:00 A.M., Civil Administration personnel came with military jeeps and two bulldozers to the Palestinian village of Bardala in the northern Jordan Valley. The force uprooted and vandalized some 70 six-year-old olive trees belonging to a family in the village.
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