On Monday, Israeli soldiers demolished a mosque and several structures in the Arab Ara’ra Bedouin community, near Jaba’ town, east of the occupied capital, Jerusalem, in the West Bank.
Media sources reported that several army vehicles, including bulldozers, invaded the community after the soldiers surrounded it.
Local resident Najeh Ara’ra said the soldiers demolished a mosque, an abandoned house, a guesthouse, and several barns.
He added that the community is home to more than eighty families from Arab Al-Jahalin, and that the soldiers also marked several structures with red paint, apparently to demolish them later.
The latest violations coincide with the expansion of the illegal “Adam” Israeli colony, established on stolen Palestinian lands owned by the Palestinians in Jaba’.
All of Israel’s colonies in the occupied West Bank, including those in and around occupied East Jerusalem, are illegal under International Law, the Fourth Geneva Convention in addition to various United Nations and Security Council resolutions. They also constitute war crimes under International Law.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory”.
Article 8(2) of the Rome Statute, ‘the transfer, directly or indirectly, by an occupying power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory’ are unlawful.
