The Israeli municipality’s planning and building committee in Occupied Jerusalem announced its intent on Wednesday to appropriate vast tracts of Palestinian land in the south of the holy city to build public buildings and roads and expand the illegal settlement of Givat Hamatos.
Jerusalem mayor Adnan Ghaith said that this new Israeli plan is aimed at severing the geographical contiguity between Jerusalem and Bethlehem and isolating the holy city from its environs.
Ghaith warned that this Israeli plan would encircle Jerusalem with a belt of settlements annex some of them to the municipality’s territorial boundaries and remove certain Palestinian villages and neighborhoods from these new Jerusalemite borders in order to create a change in the demographic and geographic structure of the holy city.
“The occupation authority is seeking to impose a new fait accompli with no regard for the international law and the international community. It is persistent in its plots against the holy city” the mayor underlined.
He pointed out that this new settlement plan would happen concurrently with another major one in the Qalandia area where roads would be built to connect settlements with each other.
In the same context the Hebrew Walla news website affirmed that the planning and building committee in Jerusalem approved the annexation of a large area of Palestinian land in order to build homes facilities and roads in Givat Hamatos settlement.
According to Walla the plan includes the construction of housing units commercial facilities and other structures in the settlement where Jewish Ethiopian immigrants live.
The committee had already okayed a plan in 2014 to build about 2600 housing units in the same area before the Israeli government decided to freeze it following international pressures.
For its part Haaretz website said that the Israeli government plans to build thousands of housing units in different areas of Jerusalem in an attempt to bring about a major change on the geopolitical map of the region and perpetuate the settler presence in the holy city.
“Givat Hamatos E1 Atarot and Pisgat Ze’ev – these are all areas in or around Jerusalem that lie beyond Israel’s 1967 borders where the state is currently advancing extensive building plans for Jews” Haaretz said.
“The Biden administration is so far refraining at least publicly from pressuring Israel so that it freezes these construction plans. Given the composition of Israel’s government such pressure could turn into a political crisis” the newspaper added.
“The Givat Hamatos and E1 area were always a red zone for the US and the international community. The two plans are considered particularly problematic since Givat Hamatos would completely cut off the large village of Beit Safafa from Palestinian East Jerusalem surrounding it with Jewish neighborhoods” it pointed out.
“Construction in E1 would split the West Bank into two parts impeding traffic between the northern and southern parts of the West Bank. For the international community these would constitute two nails in the coffin of the two-state solution” it said.
