Around 200 Palestinians, including 78 children, who were living in the village of Ein Samiya packed their belongings and left for good earlier this week to avoid the constant violence unleashed by illegal Israeli settlers and occupation forces. Activists have termed it yet another instance of ethnic cleansing.
The Palestinians have been living in the village in the Jordan Valley for decades. Due to the fact that the village falls in Area C of the occupied West Bank, the villagers were never allowed to build permanent homes and other infrastructure by the Israeli occupation authorities.
According to the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993 between Palestinians and Israel, the occupied West Bank was divided into three areas A, B and C. Land under area A is under Palestinian control, B is under joint administration and C, which is more than 60% of all occupied West Bank, is completely under Israeli military administration. The accords are now largely defunct as Israel has violated them relentlessly.
In recent years, the Palestinians were subjected to violence from settlers living nearby in illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli authorities often protected the settlers and harassed the Palestinian villagers by demolishing their makeshift homes and schools and other civil infrastructure.
The constant harassment, settler and military violence, and the construction of illegal settlements on the grazing land had “compelled” Palestinian families to gradually leave the village, said acting humanitarian coordinator for the occupied territories Yvonne Helle.
Reacting to the development, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh called it “racist” and “ethnic cleansing.” He noted that this is a part of the systematic expansion of illegal settlements by appropriating Palestinian land.
Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem called the forceful displacement of the Palestinian residents of Ein Samiya “illegal” and “a war crime.”
Similar tactics of forceful displacement are pursued at different other places in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. For example, Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta, Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and the Negev desert are facing similar Israeli atrocities.
“Israel’s policy, whose goal is to allow the state to take over more and more Palestinian land to be used by Jews, is applied across the West Bank against dozens of Palestinian communities,” B’Tselem underlined.
