A group of Israeli settlers have destroyed scores of olive trees in the occupied West Bank, Press TV reports.
The settlers destroyed around 200 trees belonging to Palestinian farmers in the village of Kafr Qaddum, east of Qalailya in the occupied West Bank, said Ghassan Daghlas, the Palestinian official in charge of monitoring illegal settlers’ activities in the area.
He said the settlers from 39 Israeli settlements neighboring the area uprooted the olive saplings on Sunday.
Israeli settlers launch attacks against Palestinians and their property as well as Islamic holy sites.
On January 1, al-Tadamun Foundation for Human Rights, an NGO, said in an annual report that an estimated 8,000 trees, some of them hundreds of years old, had been damaged and destroyed altogether by the Israelis.
“Settlers’ attacks include uprooting, burning and cutting down olive trees… Olive groves were also flooded by wastewater from the settlements,” said the rights group, adding, “We have been unable to count the hundreds of trees damaged in groves close to settlements due to Israeli security measures.”
According to villagers living south of the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli settlers used chemicals in several cases last June to burn 1,500 trees there. In the blaze that followed, more than 49 acres of prime agricultural land was also destroyed.
The presence and continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine has created a major obstacle for the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East.
More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 illegal settlements built since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds in 1967.
The United Nations and most countries regard the Israeli settlements as illegal because the territories were captured by Israel in a war in 1967 and are hence subject to the Geneva Conventions, which forbid construction on occupied lands.
IA/MAM/AS
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