HRW Slams ‘Israeli’ Land Policies against Palestinians

By Staff, Agencies

Human Right Watch [HRW] condemned the Zionist regime’s discriminatory land policies against Palestinians in the West Bank, besieged Gaza Strip, and elsewhere in the occupied territories, saying while Palestinian communities are squeezed and their residents’ access to land is being sharply restricted, ‘Israeli’-inhabited towns are growing.

The New York-based body, in a report published on Tuesday, said a great proportion of the Palestinian population has been confined to densely-populated towns and villages as a result of the Tel Aviv regime’s decades-long discriminatory policies of land expropriation.

It noted that “even though Palestinian neighborhoods have little room to expand, the ‘Israeli’ authorities nurture the growth and expansion of nearby predominantly ‘Israeli’ communities — most of which have been constructed on Palestinian-owned lands.”

Moreover, many ‘Israeli’-populated towns have admissions committees, which effectively do not allow Palestinians to live there.

The HRW went on to say that the 'Israeli' regime directly controls 93 percent of the land in the occupied territories, including East al-Quds, and the so-called ‘Israel’ Land Authority [ILA] manages and allocates such pieces of land.

Almost half the members of ‘ILA’s’ governing body apparently belong to an ‘Israeli’ fund whose explicit mandate is to develop and lease land for ‘Israeli’ Jews and not any other segment of the population.