JERUSALEM — Israeli bulldozers arrived before dawn on Monday and began clawing at the first of 10 Palestinian apartment blocks that were slated for demolition because the government said they were illegally built too close to its security barrier in a Palestinian area of the West Bank abutting Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem.
Israel’s minister of strategic affairs and public security, Gilad Erdan, said in a statement that the government had gone ahead with the “demolition of the illegal and mostly uninhabited buildings” after an Israeli court ruled that they constituted “a severe security threat and can provide cover to suicide bombers and other terrorists hiding among civilian population.”
United Nations officials had appealed to Israel to call off the demolition, which Palestinian officials condemned as a “war crime” and “ethnic cleansing.” The office of President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority called it “a serious escalation against our defenseless Palestinian people” and called for international intervention.
United Nations officials said that 17 Palestinians, including an elderly couple and five children, were being displaced by the demolitions. Footage from the early morning showed distraught Palestinians being led away by security forces.
The decision to proceed with the demolition underscored the legal complexities and human difficulties caused by the absence of internationally recognized boundaries and competing authorities.
The buildings, most of which were still under construction, sit in West Bank territory, in the Wadi Hummus neighborhood on the edge of southeast Jerusalem. They went up with the approval of the Palestinian Authority, which technically has jurisdiction there.
But they also sit on the Jerusalem side of the security barrier in an area the Israeli military had declared a buffer zone and prohibited building in, citing security grounds.
Israel’s High Court rejected an appeal against the demolition orders by residents in June, and on Sunday dismissed another petition asking for a postponement, paving the way for the demolitions. The court “ruled unequivocally that those who built houses in the area of the security fence knew that building in that area was prohibited, and took the law into their own hands,” Mr. Erdan said.
The decision to proceed with the demolition comes at a delicate time, even by the fraught standards of the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic. A little over a year ago, the Trump administration moved the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to the contested holy city, and it is now preparing to unveil its long-awaited peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After years of impasse, the Americans have sought to emphasize, including at a conference in Bahrain a month ago, the economic incentives that they say a political settlement could bring.
The Palestinian leadership boycotted the conference and has curbed its dealings with the Trump administration, viewing it as hopelessly biased toward Israel. And the developments on Monday only served to reinforce that stance.
“This is the Israeli understanding of prosperity for peace,” Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official and veteran negotiator, wrote sarcastically of the demolitions on Twitter. Calling for an investigation by the International Criminal Court, he added, “A war crime is being committed.”
Mr. Abbas’ office called the demolition “Israeli butchery.”
In total, the 10 mostly unfinished buildings contain around 70 apartments, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In all, around 350 people are said to be at risk of property loss.
Wadi Hummus is joined to the larger East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur Baher. Israel looped the Sur Baher section of the barrier east of Wadi Hummus, beyond the Jerusalem city limit and into the West Bank, in part to avoid splitting the community, and at the request of the residents.
Ir Amim, a nonprofit that calls for an equitable solution for Jerusalem as a dual capital of Israel and a future Palestine, said residents of Sur Baher had begun constructing homes in Wadi Hummus in recent years based on building permits obtained from the Palestinian Authority because of the difficulty in obtaining permits to build in Israeli-annexed Sur Baher from the Israeli authorities.
Citing residents, Ir Amim said the demolition in Wadi Hummus could be a harbinger, putting about 100 additional buildings constructed under similar circumstances at risk.
Israel conquered East Jerusalem, along with the West Bank, in the 1967 war, seizing those territories from Jordan. It then annexed East Jerusalem in a move that was never internationally recognized. It began building the barrier around Jerusalem in 2002 at the height of a Palestinian suicide bombing campaign inside Israeli cities.
But most of the system of steel fences and concrete walls runs through West Bank territory, east of the 1967 line, and Palestinians have long described it as a land grab. In an advisory opinion in 2014, the International Court of Justice found the construction of the barrier inside the West Bank to be illegal.
Source : Nytimes
