Israeli company to invest over $55mn in al-Quds settlement projects

An Israeli construction company is going to spend millions of dollars on the expansion of settlements in the Old City of Jerusalem al-Quds in violation of international law and UN Security Council resolutions condemning the Tel Aviv regime’s land expropriation policies in the occupied territories.

According to a report published by the Hebrew-language daily Israel Hayom, the Company for the Reconstruction and Development of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem will invest more than 200 million shekels ($55,288,940) in the projects.

The projects will include renovating the Tiferet Yisrael Synagogue, the Burnt House and the Wohl Archaeological Museum.

Palestinians and Israeli anti-settlement groups have described the move as a new attempt by the Tel Aviv regime to Judaize the Old City of Jerusalem al-Quds.

Earlier this week, Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO opposing Israel's settlement expansion activities, published a new map, describing an “accelerated, intensifying chain of new facts on the ground in the most historically contested and politically sensitive part of Jerusalem [al-Quds]: the Old City and adjacent ring of Palestinian neighborhoods.”

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The map pointed to a mounting number of Israeli regime-sponsored settlement campaigns inside Palestinian neighborhoods, as well as “settler-initiated evictions of Palestinians, takeovers of their homes, and the expansion of settler compounds,” in addition the use of “touristic settlement sites” as “key points along a ring of tightening Israeli control.”

Ir Amim said tourism and supposed archaeology projects “assume a central role in Israeli settlement policy.”

The NGO group also stressed handing over the management of such projects to settlement organizations allows Israel “to exploit tourism as a tool for reinforcing settlement initiatives in the Old City and its environs, erasing the significant Palestinian presence there, promulgating the idea of the entire area as an Israeli environment, and imposing a nationalistic Israeli character that blurs the multi-religious and multi-cultural nature of the space, primarily to the detriment of the Muslim sites and presence.”

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The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) says Israeli authorities approved construction of 10,298 new settler units in the occupied West Bank last year.

“This use of national parks and tourist sites serves the goal of transforming the Palestinian neighborhoods in and around the Old City, including Silwan, al-Tur, Ras al-Amud and Sheikh Jarrah, from a densely populated Palestinian area into one sprawling tourist site that bolsters Israeli control of the area and access to it,” Ir Amim pointed out.

About 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds.

The UN Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in the occupied territories in several resolutions.

Less than a month before US President Donald Trump took office, the United Nations Security Council in December 2016 adopted Resolution 2334, calling on Israel to “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem” al-Quds.

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

The last round of Israeli-Palestinian talks collapsed in 2014. Among the major sticking points in those negotiations was Israel’s continued settlement expansion on Palestinian territories.

Trump backtracked on Washington’s support for a “two-state solution” in 2017, saying he would support any solution favored by both sides.

“Looking at two-state or one-state, I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one both parties like. I can live with either one,” the US president said during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington on February 15, 2017.

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