Israeli occupation forces demolished two agricultural structures on Tuesday evening in the Khallet al‑Haramiya area west of Kafr ad‑Deek, in the Salfit district in the occupied West Bank’s central area and detained five Palestinian citizens for more than two hours during the operation.
Local residents said the bulldozers leveled the two structures, which together covered roughly 600 square meters, before soldiers detained the five men who were present: Emad Omar Ya‘qoub, Ghazi Ibrahim Khidr, Khidr Abdullah Khidr, Mohammad Jaser ‘Aqel, and Adnan Attallah Shahada.
Witnesses added that the soldiers also seized four privately owned vehicles belonging to the detained citizens and moved them into the illegal colonial grazing outpost established in the area. The Palestinians were released later, but the vehicles remained inside the outpost.
Residents noted that illegal paramilitary Israeli colonizers had forced the owners to evacuate the livestock structures several months earlier, clearing the way for the occupation army to carry out Tuesday’s demolition.
The demolition fits into a long‑documented pattern across the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces routinely destroy Palestinian homes, agricultural rooms, barns, water systems, and livelihood structures to expand colonies and outposts or to restrict Palestinian access to land.
These actions violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from destroying civilian property unless strictly required by military necessity—conditions that are not met in the overwhelming majority of cases documented by human rights organizations. Article 53 of the Convention explicitly forbids such destruction, and Article 147 classifies it as a grave breach.
UN Security Council resolutions—including 2334, 446, 452, and 465—affirm that Israeli colonies in the occupied West Bank have no legal validity and demand an end to measures that alter the demographic and geographic character of the territory.
Demolitions that facilitate settlement expansion directly contravene these resolutions. International human rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, also protect the right to property, adequate housing, work, food security, and livelihood—all of which are undermined when agricultural structures and grazing areas are destroyed.
Human rights groups such as OCHA, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Al‑Haq have repeatedly documented that demolitions often occur near illegal colonial outposts, where Palestinian farmers are pressured or forced to abandon land. The seizure of vehicles during these operations, as happened in Kafr ad‑Deek, is considered arbitrary confiscation and a form of coercion prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Residents of Salfit and surrounding villages say the pattern is clear: colonizers push families off their land, outposts expand, and the occupation army later arrives to formalize the takeover through demolition and confiscation. The events in Khallet al‑Haramiya follow this same trajectory.
