Israel approved almost 14,000 settler homes and demolished over 500 Palestinian structures during 9 months of peace talks
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/04/demolished-palestinian-structures.html?utm_source
BY Kate on Mondoweiss 30 April 2014
Citing figures from the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the PLO said Israel demolished a total of 508 Palestinian structures, 312 of which were homes, from July 30, 2013 to April 29, 2014.
"As a result, 878 persons were forcibly displaced," the statement said.
The report said that in one case, Israel demolished an entire Palestinian village in the Jordan Valley.
Israeli bulldozers destroyed "the entire community of Khirbit Makhoul (home to 120 Palestinians). In this case alone, more than 20 families became homeless as part of an Israeli plan to deport indigenous Palestinians living in the area."
"Israeli occupation forces also prevented the distribution of humanitarian aid by the government of Palestine and international organizations. The community was surrounded by the illegal settlements of Hmeidat and Roi as well as by an Israeli occupation military camp," the statement said.
Additionally, the report noted that 61 Palestinians died as a result of actions by Israeli forces throughout peace talks. Some 1,100 were been injured.
Some 3,674 Palestinians were detained by Israeli forces, it added.
The US-brokered peace talks made little visible progress, and hit a major stumbling block in late March when Israel refused to honor a commitment to free two dozen veteran Palestinian prisoners, prompting Abbas to resume recognition moves by signing 15 international treaties.
Furious, Israel immediately unveiled economic sanctions by freezing tax monies it collects on behalf of Ramallah and suspending a joint natural gas drilling project off the Gaza coast.
A political source quoted by the Walla news website said the freezing of tax monies was "just a first step" and that more was to follow after Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip announced a surprise unity deal aimed at ending years of rivalry.
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Haaretz editorial: Israel’s whitewashed territories
30 Apr — Appropriating land and declaring it ‘state land’ is a historic injustice that is a fundamental aspect of the occupation — The Israeli government and its proxies in the West Bank have never let up in their efforts to portray the settlement enterprise as legal, even though it is a sweeping violation of international law. An ongoing example of this is the work of the Blue Line task force, which was set up by the Civil Administration to reevaluate the validity of the status of state land. Some one million dunams (250,000 acres) of land were declared to be state land during the 1980s, in an effort to circumvent objections voiced by the High Court of Justice to seizing lands for settlement. Appropriating land and declaring it “state land” is a historic injustice that is a fundamental aspect of the occupation. Meanwhile, as the years have passed, it emerged that these designations were not based on orderly examinations of legal ownership, a fact that has embroiled the state in numerous lawsuits. The state has been reexamining the status of these lands for over 13 years. To get a new permit to build on “old” state lands (as opposed to newly declared lands), developers must get the approval of the blue-line team – so named because the state land designations are marked by a blue line on government maps. But in practice it seems that on some of these lands, homes and outposts have already been built. In order to retroactively whitewash them, and to enable other settlements to expand “legally,” the Civil Administration in 2013 re-designated some 28,000 dunams as state land.
From the data revealed by Haaretz’s Chaim Levinson on Tuesday, it emerges that most of the land in question is within the municipal boundaries of various settlements, and around half of it is east of the West Bank separation barrier.