HEBRON, Israeli forces today razed a Palestinian house in Khallet al-Eeda area, close to Jabal Johar, in the southern part of Hebron city, according to WAFA correspondent.

He said that several army jeeps and bulldozers stormed the area, where the gun-toting soldiers muscled inside the family house of Arafat al-Rajabi, and forced the eight-member family out of the 120-square-meter property.

The soldiers then demolished the property purportedly for being built without a permit from the so-called “Civil Administration Office”, reducing it to rubble.

Israel’s policy of home demolitions is an illegal act of collective punishment that violates International Law.

Israeli refuses to permit virtually any Palestinian construction in Palestinian communities, villages and towns in occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank, including Area C, which constitutes 60 percent of the 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 much more easily gives over 700,000 Jewish Israeli settlers there building permits and provides them with roads, electricity, water and sewage systems that remain inaccessible to many neighboring Palestinians.

The “Civil Administration” is the name Israel gives to the body administering its military occupation of the West Bank.

Soldiers in the oxymoronically named Civil Administration 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: Palestine News & Info Agency