NABLUS, Thursday, January 12, 2023 (WAFA) – Israeli occupation authorities Thursday morning tore down a cattle shack in Duma town, south of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, according to a local official.
The town mayor, Suleiman Dawabsha, said that Israeli forces, accompanied by a bulldozer, raided the town, where the heavy machinery demolished a 170-square-meter livestock breeding shack belonging to five women’s associations.
Israel denies planning permits for Palestinians to build on their own land or to extend existing houses to accommodate natural growth, particularly in Jerusalem and Area C, which constitutes 60 percent of the occupied West Bank and falls under full Israeli military rule, forcing residents to build without obtaining rarely-granted permits to provide shelters for their families.
In contrast, Israel argues that building within existing colonial settlements is necessary to accommodate the “natural growth” of settlers. Therefore, it much more easily gives the over 800,000 Jewish Israeli settlers their building permits and provides them with roads, electricity, water, and sewage systems that remain inaccessible to many neighboring Palestinians.
Soldiers in the oxymoronically named Civil Administration, the name Israel gives to the body administering its military occupation of the West Bank, determine where Palestinians may live, where and when they may travel (including to other parts of the occupied territories like Gaza and East Jerusalem), whether they can build or expand homes on their own land, whether they own that land at all, whether an Israeli settler can take over that land among others.
