Days of Palestine – Jerusalem
Miri Regev, the Israeli Minister of Transportation, approved the building of a settlement bypass road in the northern West Bank that would entail the appropriation of thousands of dunums of Palestinian agricultural land.
A Hebrew website revealed on Wednesday that the minister had allocated 76 million shekels for this project and it was called Lubban Bypass because it passes near the village of Lubban in the Salfit district.
The bypass road is the latest in a series of similar roads approved in various other areas in the occupied West Bank.
Another such road, the Hawara bypass road would also expropriate thousands of dunums of Palestinian agricultural land, and work would begin in it soon to the south of Nablus.
A third road is called Arroub bypass which bypasses the Al-Arroub refugee camp in al-Khalil.
According to the site, this comes in light of Regev’s plan to extend sovereignty over the West Bank through a large network of roads linking West Bank settlements with transportation lines inside the 1948 Occupied Palestine.
According to the Hebrew media, the stated goal of these projects is to serve the Jewish settlers but there is another goal set by the Yesha (Settlements) Council in the West Bank last year 2019, which stipulates bringing a million Israelis to settle in the West Bank settlements within a decade and a half.
The Hebrew newspaper, Haaretz, revealed, through an investigation published earlier, the Israeli authorities’ measures seeking to implement the annexation plan through the implementation of expansionary settlement projects in various parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The normalization agreements signed with the UAE and Bahrain recently did not stop the annexation project, “as everyone believes”, according to the newspaper.
Haaretz added that the current plans aim to link settlements with major Israeli cities and to restrict the development of Palestinian cities.
It quoted an Israeli activist as saying, “Everyone believes that the annexation has stopped after the signing of the normalization agreements but in reality, Israel continues to move quickly towards annexing the West Bank by developing the infrastructure that will help double the number of settlers and thus extend control over the Palestinians forever.”
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