The plot to destroy 2000 fully mature olive trees near the city of Bethlehem, in southern West Bank, was rubber-stamped by the Israeli occupation authorities, according to WAFA News Agency.
The 2000 trees, extend over a 1600 meter long road connecting two Palestinian villages, Taqou’ town and al-Minya, and take up 80 dunums of land, belonging to Palestinians.
Local activist Hasan Brijiyeh, an anti-settlement, anti-wall activist told WAFA that the Israeli regime has intensified it’s arrest of the youth, theft of land, and road closures in the area.
Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 states that the occupying force is forbidden from transferring members of its own population onto the land that it occupied.
Israel occupied Palestine in 1948, and regularly demolishes Palestinian homes to make room for Jewish-only settlements across the West Bank. Today, about 600,000 illegal Israeli settlers reside in the occupied Palestinian Territories, in defiance of International Law.
