Israel Razes Palestinian Bedouin Village for Second Time

• Israel Razes Palestinian Bedouin Village for Second Time
  by Adel Abu Nimeh, https://www.reuters.com/
  JORDAN VALLEY, West Bank (Reuters) – Israel has begun demolishing a Bedouin village in the occupied West Bank for the second time in three months, in what a rights group called an attempt to displace an entire Palestinian community from the area.
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  Israeli authorities said the village of Khirbet Humsah, in the northern West Bank’s Jordan Valley, had been constructed illegally on a military firing range, and that residents had rejected their offer to move to a nearby area.
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  Khirbet Humsah’s 130 inhabitants have vowed to stay, with some sleeping on mattresses and plastic tarps strewn on the rocky soil. Tented homes and animal shelters in the village were last razed in November, though residents returned soon after.
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  “We will not move from here, we will stay here. If they demolish, we will rebuild,” said one of the residents, Ibrahim Abu Awad. He and other Bedouin in the village said they feared Israeli settlers would seize the vacated land.
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  The Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the demolition at Khirbet Humsah was “unusually broad”, accusing Israel of seeking “to forcibly transfer Palestinian communities in order to take over their land”. Some 440,000 Israeli settlers live among more than 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank, territory captured by Israel in a 1967 war and which Palestinians want as part of a future state.
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  Israeli forces began dismantling tents and livestock pens in Khirbet Humsah on Monday, residents and B’Tselem said. On Wednesday, Israeli troops accompanied by bulldozers also knocked down several steel and wooden structures in the village, Reuters TV footage showed.
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• Israel Orders Demolition of New Palestinian School in Occupied West Bank
  by https://www.dailysabah.com/
  An Israeli court on Thursday ordered the demolition of a new Palestinian school in the occupied West Bank. The court ruled that Ras al-Tenneen school in eastern Ramallah city was built without the necessary construction permit and rejected an appeal against its imminent demolition, according to Abdullah Abu Rahma, a Palestinian activist. Rahma told Anadolu Agency (AA) that some 50 children were already enrolled in the school, which was recently built and is run by the Palestinian Education Ministry. He said Palestinian activists have started gathering at the school to prevent Israeli officials from razing the structure. The school is located in a part of the occupied West Bank classified as Area C which accounts for around 60% of the West Bank territory and remains under full Israeli control since 1995.
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  Palestinian children face the challenge of getting an education in the occupied territories as most of their schools consist only of caravans and playgrounds. Destroying the hope and means of education, and with it the future of Palestinian children and youth, Israel effectively does not allow Palestinians to build schools and other public structures by denying them building permits.
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  Palestinian schools have long been subjected to Israeli violence. During the 2014 Gaza war, the Israeli army launched a military operation on Gaza, destroying 24 schools. Israeli shelling killed at least 15 Palestinians sheltering in a United Nations-run school and another 17 near a street market. In February 2018, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that at least 45 schools in Palestine were facing the threat of destruction by the Israeli authority. In a released statement, the OCHA acting coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territories, Roberto Valent, pointed out that a Palestinian school in east Jerusalem was destroyed by Israeli soldiers, and added: “The demolition was carried out on the grounds of lack of Israeli-issued permits, which are nearly impossible to obtain.”
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  Israel has already demolished more than 500 structures in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip this year, OCHA said late September. In a statement, the U.N. office said 506 buildings were razed by Israeli forces in the West Bank on the pretext of lacking a building permit.
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