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Israel forces Palestinian farmers off lands in Jordan Valley

Palestinians collect olives at the start of the annual harvest season in Gaza City on October 16, 2017. (Photo by AFP)

Israeli forces have forced Palestinian farmers off lands they were working on in the Jordan Valley area of the Tubas district in the northern occupied West Bank, a Palestinian media report says.

According to official Palestinian Wafa news agency, Israeli forces ordered a group of Palestinian farmers near the village of Sakout to stop working and leave the lands immediately on Wednesday morning.

The Jordan Valley forms a third of the occupied West Bank, with 88 percent of its land under full Israeli military control.

Fifty-seven percent of the land in the valley has been declared closed military zones, where Israeli army forces routinely train using live ammunition and explosive devices.

Israeli authorities have recently decided to confiscate thousands of square meters of private Palestinian lands in the northern West Bank .

 

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Palestinian farmers have remained a constant target of vandalism by Israeli military and settlers.

In Mid October, Israeli settlers stole the olive harvest of dozens of trees belonging to a number of Palestinian farmers from the occupied West Bank districts of Ramallah and Nablus.

Israeli settlers were also caught on camera vandalizing Palestinian farms and stealing their olive harvest. The footage, released by Israeli NGO Rabbis for Human Rights, clearly showed Israeli settlers trespassing onto Palestinian property and stealing olives from the groves belonging to Palestinians.

Most of the attacks carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property are met with impunity, with those guilty rarely facing consequences for such actions.

Several rights groups, including Yesh Din and B’Tselem, have on several occasions slammed the regime in Tel Aviv failing to protect Palestinians from settler violence or investigate attacks, particularly during olive harvest season.

Last year, the Israeli army tried to sell the animals it had unlawfully seized from Palestinian farmers in the Jordan Valley back to them. The Israeli army had published advertisements for the sale of 40 donkeys in Arabic, targeting an audience of Palestinian farmers from whom the animals were seized in the first place.

Israel occupied the entire West Bank, including East al-Quds, during full-frontal military operations in 1967. It later annexed the territories. Neither move has ever been recognized by the international community.

Upon annexation, it began propping up the settlements, deemed as illegal by the international community due to their construction on occupied territory.

In December 2016, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2334 that denounced the Israeli settlements as a “flagrant violation of international law.”


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