Israeli forces last night suppressed an anti-settlement rally in Beita town, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus, injuring some 20 people, according to medical sources.
They said that Israeli forces used violent means to disperse a rally called for to protest the construction of the new colonial settlement of Givat Eviatar atop Jabal Sabih (Sabih Mountain), near the town, as well as the seizure of lands belonging to the villagers of Beita, Huwarra, and Za‘tara to inaugurate a new settler-only bypass road.
Director of the Palestinian Red Crescent’s (PRC) Emergency Department in Nablus, Ahmad Jibril, said PRC paramedics treated 21 injuries, including12 protestors who suffocated from tear gas, eight others who sustained fractures and bruises from falling from high places after being chased by the soldiers and another who was directly hit by a tear gas canister.
He added that four casualties were evacuated to a hospital for treatment.
Meanwhile, Deputy mayor of Beita, Mousa Hamayel, said that Israeli soldiers rounded up a young man after breaking into his house in the town.
Palestinians across Historic Palestine have been rising up against decades of Israeli settler- colonialism and apartheid. The villagers of Beita have not only been protesting decades of Israeli oppression, but also intensified Israeli pillage of their land.
In almost a month, five Palestinians were killed and over 618 others were injured while trying to oust the colonial settler outpost built atop Mount Sabih.
In addition to Mount Sabih, Israeli forces have erected another colonial settlement outpost atop Mount Al-Arma, north of Beita, a few months ago, as both mounts enjoy a strategic location as they overlook the Jordan Valley, a fertile strip of land running west along the Jordan River which makes up approximately 30% of the West Bank.
The construction of the two colonial outposts atop Mount Sabih, south of Beita, and Mount Al-Arma, north of the town, besides to a bypass road to the west is an Israeli measure to push Palestinian villages and towns into crowded enclaves, ghettos, surrounded by walls, settlements and military installations, and disrupt their geographic contiguity with other parts of the West Bank.
The number of settlers living in Jewish-only colonial settlements across occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank in violation of international law has jumped to over 700,000 and colonial settlement expansion has tripled since the signing of Oslo Accords in 1993.
Israel’s nation-state law, passed in July 2018, enshrines Jewish supremacy, and states that building and strengthening the colonial settlements is a “national interest.”
Source: Palestinian News & Info Agency