Ethic Cleansing in Palestine

Palestinians continue to be displaced and marginalized by Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing throughout the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. The new Labor government has continued the policies of ID card confiscation, home demolition, settlement construction, and land confiscation. Under the new government, the Israeli Ministry of Housing and Construction has issued tenders for the construction of 2,594 housing units in West Bank settlements. (Ha'aretz, 27/9/99). The pace of settlement construction in the first three months of the Barak administration has outpaced the rate of settlement construction under the previous Netanyahu government. In the south of the West Bank, orders were issued for the confiscation of 618 dunums (4 dunums=1 acre) of land belonging to Izna village and 803 dunums from nearby Beit Awla. (AFP, 26/9/99). According to reports published in al-Ayyam (20/9/99) an additional 2,250 dunums will be confiscated for a new 7.5 km settler bypass road around Bethlehem and Beit Sahour with additional land for a second bypass road some 850 meters long. The report also noted that some 10,000 dunums were confiscated, 400 fruit trees uprooted and 50 homes demolished in the north of the West Bank since the beginning of 1999. An additional 4,500 dunums of Bethlehem land are targeted for annexation to Jerusalem under plans for the expansion of the Bethlehem checkpoint.