Published On 20/10/2025
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Last update: 19:36 (Mecca time)
Today, Monday, the Israeli occupation army demolished a Palestinian farm east of the city of Jerusalem, and bulldozed dozens of acres of agricultural land in the south of the West Bank, as part of an accelerating settlement escalation aimed at changing the features of the Palestinian land.
The Jerusalem Governorate said in a statement that Israeli army vehicles demolished a farm belonging to citizen Farouk Mustafa in the Rawabi al-Issawiya area near the town of al-Za’im, east of occupied Jerusalem, under the pretext of building without a permit.
Mustafa explained that the occupation forces stormed the farm, accompanied by bulldozers, and proceeded to demolish a tin barn with an area of 150 square meters and an agricultural pergola with an area of 100 metres. They also bulldozed the fence surrounding the land, which amounted to about 8 dunums (a dunum is equal to a thousand square metres), causing widespread destruction to the farm.
The governorate indicated that the demolition comes as part of an accelerated settlement policy to implement the “E1” plan, which aims to empty Palestinian lands east of Jerusalem and annex them to settlements, thus deepening the city’s isolation from its Palestinian extension in the West Bank and undermining the chances of establishing a geographically contiguous Palestinian state.
This project threatens about 7,000 Palestinians living in 22 Bedouin communities east of Jerusalem, as they face the risk of forced displacement. Last August, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced approval to build more than 6,900 settlement units near the Maale Adumim settlement, as part of a plan linking it to Jerusalem and cutting off geographical communication between Ramallah and Bethlehem.
Land leveling
In Hebron, in the south of the West Bank, Youssef Abu Maria, coordinator of the Popular Resistance Committees in the town of Beit Ummar, said that Israeli bulldozers began bulldozing about 70 dunums of agricultural land in order to expand the Beit al-Baraka settlement area.
Abu Maria explained that the bulldozing works are part of a systematic policy to “seize Palestinian lands for the benefit of settlers,” while the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission indicated that since the beginning of 2025, Israel has issued 53 orders to seize Palestinian lands for military purposes.
The authority added that over the past two years, Israel seized about 55,000 dunums and established 25 buffer zones around the settlements, as part of the acceleration of plans to effectively annex the West Bank.
The United Nations confirms that Israeli settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal and undermines the possibility of implementing the two-state solution, calling for decades to stop it to no avail.
Since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza on October 8, 2023, more than a thousand Palestinians have been martyred in the West Bank by army and settler bullets, while the number of martyrs in the Gaza Strip exceeded 68 thousand, the majority of whom were children and women, in addition to the almost complete destruction of the infrastructure.