Israeli forces today demolished a Palestinian house in Idhna town, west of the southern West Bank city of Hebron, according to local sources.
Muhammad Odeh said that Israeli forces, accompanying a bulldozer, barged their way into the southern West Bank town, where the heavy machinery knocked down his 120-square-meter house, displacing his eight-member family.
He added that he had received a demolition order issued by the occupation authorities against the house about two months ago and resorted to Israeli courts to stop the demolition, but to no avail.
The town mayor, Jaber Tmeizi, said that the occupation authorities have handed demolition orders against 350 houses as well as commercial and agricultural structures in the town.
Israel demolishes Palestinian houses and structures almost on a daily basis as a means to achieve “demographic control” of the occupied territories.
Israel denies planning permits for Palestinians to build on their own land or to extend existing houses to accommodate natural growth, particularly in Jerusalem and Area C, which constitutes 60 percent of the occupied West Bank and falls under full Israeli military rule, forcing residents to build without obtaining rarely-granted permits to provide shelters for their families.
In contrast, Israel argues that building within existing colonial settlements is necessary to accommodate the “natural growth” of settlers. Therefore, it much more easily gives the over 800,000 Jewish Israeli settlers there building permits and provides them with roads, electricity, water and sewage systems that remain inaccessible to many neighboring Palestinians.
Soldiers in the oxymoronically named Civil Administration, the name Israel gives to the body administering its military occupation of the West Bank, determine where Palestinians may live, where and when they may travel (including to other parts of the occupied territories like Gaza and East Jerusalem), whether they can build or expand homes on their own land, whether they own that land at all, whether an Israeli settler can takeover that land among others.
Source: Palestinian News & Info Agency