JERUSALEM, The Israeli occupation authorities today advanced a new colonial settlement construction plan in the occupied city of Jerusalem.

The Israeli District Planning and Building Committee approved the plan to construct hundreds of new settler units and commercial facilities as part of the “Greater Jerusalem” metropolitan plan on vast tracts of land seized from the Palestinian towns and villages of Shuafat, Beit Hanina, Beit Safafa, Walaja, Ein Karem and Lifta.

The plan envisages the expansion of the colonial settlements of Gilo, Kiryat Menachem, Neve Ya’akov, Ramot, Ramat Shlomo and Pisgat Ze’ev.

It is aimed at introducing fundamental changes in the infrastructure of these colonial settlements, linking them to the light rail line and the network of settler-only by-pass roads leading to the West Bank settlements, East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem and Israel and further isolating Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem from their depth in the West Bank and preventing their viability for future growth.

Khalil Tafakji, a cartographer and Head of the Arab Studies Society in Jerusalem’s Maps Department, said that this plan is intended to reshape the occupied city with colonial projects, so that the panoramic and demographic landscape of the city would have been totally changed by 2050.

He added that the implementation of a part of the plan was postponed so as to make room for the fundamental altering of the demographic composition of Jerusalem and merge.

East Jerusalem, an integral part of the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967, with West Jerusalem and eventually declare it as its united capital.

Source: Palestine News & Info Agency