RAMALLAH _ Palestine News Network
Israel has approved the construction of more than 10,000 settlement units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in a year, an official report said Wednesday. 2018
According to a report released by the PLO today, Israel considered US president Donald Trump´s recognition of Jerusalem as its unified capital about a year ago and the US embassy being transferred to it as a "green light to escalate its settlement projects."
According to the report, the Israeli Government has ratified "within the plan of fragmentation of the West Bank and linking settlements through a network of bypass roads" to the construction of new settlement roads at a cost of 230 million US dollars.
The report monitored Israel´s confiscation during 2018 of some 3439 dunums in the West Bank and Jerusalem for settlement expansion purposes.
He added that Israel demolished 538 houses and installations during 2018 in various areas of the West Bank and the city of Jerusalem, as well as the issuance of demolition and construction stops for 460 homes and establishments.
For its part, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and expatriates criticized international positions regarding the "escalation" of Israel´s settlement activities in the Palestinian territories.
In a statement, the ministry said, "The silence of the international community on the ongoing settlement of settlements and the failure to implement the resolutions of international legality of settlement and the failure to hold Israel accountable as an occupying power for this crime constitutes complicity, if not a crime per se."
The ministry denounced Israel´s bulldozing of more than 15 dunums of agricultural land in the south of Hebron and the razing of some 120 dunums of land in the isolated village of noon al-Maleh, southwest of Jenin, in favor of settlement expansion.
It also condemned the "unprecedented settlement operations taking place in the occupied Jordan Valley in a public lawlessness of the Palestinian territories aimed at building a large settlement belt along the Palestinian border, through the construction of more than 12 settlements and a settlement outpost."
"The absolute American bias of the occupation and the adoption by the Washington administration of its expansionist colonialist settlement policies encouraged the ruling oath in Israel, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, to carry on its own projects of ventilation in the land of the State of Palestine, which would undermine any opportunity to achieve Peace on the basis of a two-state solution ".
