CLASHES with Israeli forces left dozens of Palestinians injured in Kafr Aqab in northern Jerusalem on Tuesday, medics said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent reported that nine demonstrators suffered injuries from live fire to their lower extremities, and one was left in critical condition.
Activists reported that dozens more sustained light-to-moderate injuries from rubber-coated steel bullets, and many suffered tear-gas inhalation.
The clashes broke out after Israeli bulldozers levelled land in the Qalandiya airport area, close to Kafr Aqab. Israel has declared the area a closed military zone.
Local people said that the land was being levelled to continue the building of the separation wall, which already effectively separates the districts of Samir Amis and Kafr Aqab from Jerusalem.
Witnesses said that the ongoing clashes broke out sporadically throughout the day. On Monday, Israeli forces delivered demolition notices to buildings in the Qalandiya airport area near the wall.
Kafr Aqab was annexed by Israel along with the rest of East Jerusalem in 1980 and falls under its full jurisdiction. However, it has been cut off from the city since the construction of the wall.
• Israeli forces levelled vast areas of land in the East Jerusalem town of al-Issawiya on Tuesday morning, a local committee member reported.
According to Muhammad Abu al-Hummus, member of a local follow-up committee, large numbers of Israeli troops and municipality inspectors escorted bulldozers and excavators into the southeastern outskirts of the town, where they demolished stone walls and steel structures used by local farmers as store houses and livestock barns.
Abu al-Hummus said the bulldozers ‘deliberately’ ruined the dirt roads used by farmers to access their fields.
The land is located in an area Israeli authorities have earmarked for a national park, in a controversial plan known as ‘11092’, which aims to turn 700 dunums of land in the Palestinian towns of al-Issawiya and al-Tur into Israeli parkland.
A statement from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in 2013 previously stated that ‘the plan is part of the Israeli government’s plans to create a Jewish demographic majority in the occupied city.’
In September 2014, an Israeli planning council suspended the plan until the needs of the Arab towns could be assessed.
However, the council, which previously approved the annexation of the 700 dunums, said that approval of the plan could be justified and was not fundamentally illegal.
According to Abu al-Hummus, the local Israeli municipality has ignored the plan’s suspension.
‘Israeli forces brush aside court decisions and decisions made by different committees when it comes to implementing settlement expansion plans,’ he said.
The land levelled on Tuesday is owned by the Abu Asab, Ubeid, Dari, Abu al-Hummus and Ulayyan among others.
East Jerusalem was seized by Israel along with the West Bank in 1967 during the Six-Day War, and since then, the Israeli government has undertaken a policy of ‘Judaisation’ across the city, constructing Jewish settlements and demolishing Palestinian homes.
There are now believed to be more than 300,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem.
The international community views East Jerusalem as part of the Palestinian territories and recognises the annexation and settlement programmes as illegal under international law.
Meanwhile 15 young men and teenagers were arrested by Israeli troops in a predawn raid on the town of Tuqu, southeast of Bethlehem on Tuesday morning, municipal officials reported
Tuqu’s mayor, Hatim Sabbah, said large numbers of Israeli troops raided the town, ransacking several homes of the Sabbah family and detaining 15 young men between the ages of 14 and 20. All detainees were members of the Sabbah family.
He identified them as Sami Ali Mahmoud Sabbah, Ayyub Suleiman Ahmad Sabbah, Amjad Nayif Ali Sabbah, Mamoon Salim Mahmoud Sabbah, Ahmad Eid Atiyeh Sabbah, Muhammad Salim Ibrahim Sabbah, Sahir Khalid Ali Sabbah, Muhammad Ali Abd al-Khalil Sabbah, Atiyeh Suleiman Atiyeh Sabbah, Zakariyya Ahmad Abd al-Khalil Sabbah, Jaafar Yousuf Hussein Sabbah, Ibrahim Yousuf Hussein Sabbah, Ahmad Riyad Dawood Sabbah, Izz al-Din Khalid Sabbah and Marwan Fuad Taysir Sabbah.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said the army raided Tuqu to detain 18 Palestinians, 17 of whom were ‘suspected of hurling rocks at firebombs at civilians’. She said the other Palestinian was a ‘Hamas operative’.
The spokeswoman said three more Palestinians were detained in the northern West Bank.
Israeli forces routinely detain Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, usually on the pretext of security questioning.
Around 40 per cent of the male Palestinian population has been detained by Israeli forces, according to prisoner rights group Addameer.
Tuqu lies among the Gush Etzion cluster of settlements, and is bordered by the illegal settlement of Tekoa. Of Tuqu’s lands, 98.5 per cent are classified as Area C or Nature Reserves, leaving only 1.5 per cent as Area A.
• Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has taken his campaign of violent incitement against Palestinians to new extremes with a call for those disloyal to Israel to have their heads chopped off.
He also repeated his long-standing demands for expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
‘Anyone who’s with us should be given everything – up to half the kingdom. Anyone who’s against us, there’s nothing to do – we should raise an axe and cut off his head; otherwise we won’t survive here,’ Lieberman said at an election event in reference to Palestinian citizens of Israel.
According to Israel’s Mako news website, Lieberman made his comments in an interview with journalist Udi Segal during the ‘Electing Democracy in 2015’ conference at IDC Herzliya, an Israeli college.
There are about 1.5 million Palestinians, survivors and descendants of those who escaped expulsion from present-day Israel in 1948, who are nominally citizens of Israel. Palestinians commemorate this ethnic cleansing, which they call the Nakba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’) every year on 15 May.
While they have a vote in Israel’s upcoming election, Palestinian citizens of Israel face relentless legal and social discrimination and violent incitement and calls for expulsion.
Lieberman wants ethnic cleansing.
‘There’s no reason for Umm al-Fahm to be part of the State of Israel,’ Lieberman said in reference to a large town in the north of present-day Israel with a predominantly Palestinian population.
‘Citizens in the State of Israel who fly a black flag on Nakba Day – as far as I’m concerned they should go away, and I’ll donate them to Abu Mazen with great joy.’
Lieberman’s reference to ‘donating’ Palestinian citizens of Israel to ‘Abu Mazen’ – the Palestinian Authority’s leader Mahmoud Abbas – amounts to a renewed call for ethnic cleansing.
The Israeli foreign minister, who heads the extreme anti-Palestinian Yisrael Beiteinu party, has a long history of violent incitement. In a recent Facebook posting, Lieberman called for the execution of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
According to polls, Lieberman’s party is set to lose seats at the upcoming 17 March parliamentary election. His comments may be an effort to galvanise Israel’s anti-Arab vote, which has been drifting to other openly genocidal parties such as Naftali Bennett’s party Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home).
It is not only Israel’s right-wing politicians who appeal to voters with incitement to violence against Palestinians; Israel’s ostensible left does it as well. In a recent election ad, Yitzhak Herzog, head of Israel’s allegedly dovish Labour Party, accused Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of not hitting Gaza hard enough.
In a 51-day assault last summer, Israel committed numerous war crimes, devastating Gaza and leaving more than 2,200 people dead.
Lieberman’s latest violent incitement will feed comparisons frequently made between Israel – the self-declared ‘Jewish state’ – with ISIS (or ISIL), the self-declared ‘Islamic State’ notorious for its brutal beheadings of hostages in the areas it occupies in Iraq and Syria.
