Illegal paramilitary Israeli colonizers, backed by Israeli occupation forces, carried out a series of coordinated assaults and land‑seizure actions on Monday across multiple areas in the Salfit governorate, in central West Bank, and the Jerusalem district, targeting Palestinian farmers, shepherds, and privately owned agricultural land.
Local sources reported that a group of colonizers attacked shepherd Fawzat Fayez Rayyan while he was grazing his flock in the Khirbet Shehada area north of Qarawat Bani Hassan, west of Salfit, beating him and attempting to seize the flock before residents intervened.
According to villagers, colonizers’ presence in the area has become an almost daily occurrence aimed at preventing farmers and shepherds from accessing their lands.
In Wadi al‑Sha‘er, east of Salfit, colonizers returned to Palestinian‑owned land and installed new tents only hours after Israeli occupation forces had removed a previous tent the night before, in what residents described as a persistent effort to establish or expand a colonial outpost.
Between az‑Zawiya and Rafat, colonizers from a nearby colonial grazing outpost, built on stolen Palestinian land, destroyed an agricultural room belonging to Hamdallah Abu Naba‘a, then surrounded more than 500 dunams of adjacent Palestinian land with barbed wire, a move widely viewed as the initial stage of a gradual land takeover.
Meanwhile, Israeli occupation forces bulldozed a plot of land near the military tower installed at the entrance of Deir Ballut, west of Salfit, expanding the militarized zone around the tower.
In the Jerusalem district, Israeli forces delivered military notices ordering the uprooting of olive trees from lands belonging to residents of Hizma, near the main road connecting the town with ‘Anata.
Those who received the orders include Khairy Askar, Salem Qassem, Khaled Abu Hamdan Dar Hassan, and Ali Qassem.
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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 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment and acts of terror against civilian populations.
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”.
Articles 53 and 147, prohibit the destruction of civilian property and classify pillage as a war crime.
