According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 56.5% of the 721 km Apartheid Wall on the West Bank had already been built by May 2007, with work continuing on a further 10%. When complete, the Wall will annex between 47% and 60% of the West Bank, corralling over 92 Palestinian villages and communities with a population of almost half a million into Bantustans, ghettos and ‘military zones’. The Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip will be forced to live on 12% of Mandate Palestine
Over the last few months the Zionists’ JCB and Caterpillar bulldozers have continued building the Wall around Ma’ale Adoumim city settlement, which will completely separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. In the Salfit district, the most fertile area of the West Bank, almost all the Wall is complete, isolating more than 70% of the district’s land. Construction has also continued around the Gush ’Etzium settlement bloc which will sever the last route between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, isolating the majority of Bethlehem’s agricultural land.
In the meantime, Israel has continued to ethnically cleanse the areas along the Jerusalem-Jericho/Jordan Valley road of its Palestinian Bedouin inhabitants, to make way for further settlements expansion and the building of the Apartheid Wall. An estimated 30,000 Bedouins face expulsion and 51 families have already been served with expulsion orders and forced into a concentrated village. A total of 24 Bedouin villages with a population of 52,000 people have so far been annexed in the Jordan Valley, along with their water resources and Eastern aquifer. The Jordan Valley itself is almost completely isolated from the rest of the West Bank
On 1 November 2007, the Stop the Wall Campaign reported that the racist Israeli occupation forces have completely bulldozed the Palestinian Bedouin community of Khirbet Qasa, west Idna, to the west of Hebron city in the West Bank, driving 263 people from their homes. ‘In a matter of hours, the 263 villagers found themselves isolated from the wreckage of their tents and belongings, with only the clothes they were standing in’, the report said.
Around Jerusalem the Wall is almost finished. 90% of the Jerusalem land will be lost. New Zionist settlements are also continuously under construction around Jerusalem on the annexed lands. Eventually some 25 Palestinian villages will be completely isolated from the rest of Jerusalem and the West Bank, ripped through, separating families, cutting social and economic ties and squeezing the population into five different ghettos. This is the brutal and racist reality of Zionist occupation.
Fiona Donovan
FRFI 200 December 2007 / January 2008
