The Washington Post said that Israel has begun what activists say will be the largest mass expulsion of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank from their lands since the 1967 war, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their lands occupied by Israel.
The newspaper reported that after decades of demolition, rebuilding and a legal battle that lasted for more than 20 years, the highest court in Israel granted the Israeli army this month permission to permanently expel more than a thousand Palestinians from their land and allocate the land for army activities.
And the report - prepared by the newspaper's correspondents, Steve Hendricks and Shera Rubin - stated that the Israeli army demolished the house of a Palestinian family called the Al-Najjar family on the morning of May 11 for the second time in 5 months, but this time the family fears that it has lost its home forever, as it was flattened by Israeli bulldozers. the land one week after the issuance of the aforementioned court ruling.
The report indicated that the confiscation of land and the demolition of Palestinian homes come ahead of a scheduled visit by the US President to Israel next June, and also come after the recent approval of the Israeli government to build more than 4,200 new housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Concern and condemnation
The newspaper said that the Israeli move raised the concern of the US administration, and the US State Department spokesman, Ned Price, in response to a question about the ruling of the Israeli Supreme Court, urged the Israeli and Palestinian authorities alike to avoid everything that would raise tensions, stressing that this “includes Certainly the expulsions" of Palestinians from their lands.
The European Union also urged Israel to halt the demolitions.
A United Nations human rights panel warned that the "forced eviction" of residents could amount to a "serious violation of international, humanitarian and human rights laws," according to the Washington Post report.
The newspaper pointed out that the battle over the lands upheld by the Israeli court, which are hills south of Hebron, began in the eighties of the last century when Israeli officials demanded the confiscation of several areas in the West Bank to be used for military training purposes by the army.
She said that Israel designated that area known as "Masafer Yatta" - which has an area of about 8,000 to 14,000 acres - as a shooting and training area for the Israeli army.
According to the Washington Post, human rights defenders in both Palestine and Israel assert that Israel's real goal in establishing many of the military training areas is to empty those areas of their Arab residents and tighten Israel's grip on more occupied Palestinian lands, noting that Israel uses the land classification as military training to clear the way for the expansion of Israeli settlements, which the international community considers illegal.