The Israeli regime has granted only 66 building permits to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank over an 11-year period, Israeli media reports say.
Israel’s Haaretz daily, quoting sources, reported on Sunday that only 66 building permits were issued to Palestinians between 2009 and 2020.
This is while 22,000 permits were granted to illegal Israeli settlers during the same period, it said.
The report cited widespread demolitions carried out by the Israeli authorities since January in the Taawun neighborhood, south of Nablus in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.
Al-Taawun, it added, is “just one example of the accelerating pace of demolitions across the West Bank.”
The neighborhood is located in Area C and “did not receive building permits from the Israeli authorities, despite being far from any settlement or access road.”
“As most of the West Bank is off-limits to Palestinian development, residents are forced to build without permits,” the Israeli daily commented.
In January alone, the Israeli army demolished a total of 24 Palestinian buildings in Area C due to the lack of building permits.
The Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recently said at least 2,461 Palestinian buildings were demolished over the past two years due to the lack of building permits, up from 4,984 structures over the previous nine years.
As a result, around 3,500 people lost their homes during those two years.
The demolition campaign over the past two years has coincided with the displacement of around 80 Palestinian communities due to the rapid expansion of settler farms and outposts.
Palestinians view the measures as a prelude to the formal annexation of the West Bank.
Israel recently approved a series of sweeping measures in the occupied West Bank, which Palestinians say constitute a blatant breach of the Oslo Accords and amount to a de facto annexation of Palestinian land.
The policy, announced by Israel's extremist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and minister of military affairs Israel Katz, significantly alters governance in the West Bank, opening the way for expanded settlements, land seizures, and the erosion of Palestinian civil rights.
The measures lift longstanding legal restrictions on Israeli settlers, accelerate settlement expansion, and extend Israeli military and “civil” authority into areas that were previously under partial Palestinian control.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has strongly denounced Israel's actions as part of its ongoing colonial policy, labeling them a war crime and a grave breach of international law and UN resolutions.
