The head of the Commission for Resistance to the Wall and Colonization, Muayyad Shaaban, stated in a statement that the “expropriation orders” aim to build a new road for Jewish settlers.
These actions violate all international laws and norms that order an occupying State not to make changes on the ground, he stressed.
“What from the outside looks like a development of infrastructure and roads (…) is nothing more than a means to divide Palestinian geography,” he warned.
At the beginning of April, the Commission warned that, since the beginning of the current cycle of violence, on October 7, that country confiscated 27 thousand dunums of Palestinian land (2,700 hectares).
He specified that of that figure, 15 thousand dunums (1,500 hectares) were stolen after modifying the limits of the natural reserves in Jericho and the Jordan Valley.
Another 11,100 dunums (a little more than a thousand hectares) through three orders that declare state lands to areas in the governorates of Jerusalem and Nablus, and 230 dunums through 24 seizure orders, for military purposes, he stressed.
Israel occupies 2,380 square kilometers in Palestine, equivalent to 42 percent of the total territory of the West Bank, he revealed.
The Central Statistics Office noted last March that Israel confiscated 50,526 dunums of Palestinian land (just over five thousand hectares) in 2023, almost double the figure from the previous year.
Last year, that country issued 32 seizure orders of about 619 dunams, four for expropriation equivalent to 433 dunums and two for declaration of state lands for about 515 dunums, he stressed.
He also decreed four modifications to the borders of the natural reserves, which allowed them to seize 48,959 dunums as part of the systematic and continuous policy to control all Palestinian lands, he criticized.
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