Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes in West Bank increased by 65%: UN office

The Israeli regime has shot up the monthly rate at which it destroys the Palestinian-owned structures in the occupied West Bank by 65 percent compared to last year, a UN office reports.

The world body’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Palestinian Territories (OCHA) raised the alarm in a report on Tuesday.

According to the office, Israel's actions resulted in the displacement of 305 Palestinians, including 172 children. At least 435 people also had their livelihoods or access to services affected, the body said.

Last month alone, Israeli forces either laid waste to or seized 153 Palestinian-owned structures across the Tel Aviv-occupied territory, including in the East Jerusalem al-Quds.

Israel’s destructive march in February also broke the record of monthly demolitions since 2009, when the UN began to keep track of the times, when the regime would render another Palestinian family homeless.

The regime occupied the West Bank in a hugely Western-armed and -favored war in 1967. Ever since, the territory has become freckled with hundreds of settlements that the UN considers to be illegal due to their construction on occupied territory.

Tel Aviv’s construction activities in East al-Quds serves better to reflect its sheer disregard for the Palestinians, who seek this expanse of their occupied land to serve as the capital of their future state.

Tel Aviv has demarcated a whopping 60 percent of the West Bank as the so-called Area-C, where it has exempted its military forces from obtaining permissions for seizing any given Palestinian-owned property and notifying its residents in advance.

The OCHA said some 90 percent of the Palestinian structures that had been razed so far this year were located in the area.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), meanwhile, issued a diatribe, blasting Tel Aviv’s continued unilateral actions and violations, including its military-powered destructions in the West Bank.

PA spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh said the aggravations were counterproductive to establishment of peace and security, and would ruin the prospect of the so-called “two-state” solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

As the most recent instance of the violations, he pointed to Israeli courts’ mandating destruction of 100 Palestinian homes in the Silwan neighborhood’s al-Bustan area and the tribunals’ rubberstamping seizure of tens of similar structures in al-Quds’ Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

Tel Aviv’s demolitions and its concomitant illegal settlement construction, he added, were aimed at negating international efforts at conflict resolution.

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