Forty-seven years have passed since the Eternal Land Day , and the Palestinian land is still groaning under the weight of the occupation policies that have turned the Palestinian cities and villages in the West Bank into separate and isolated islands and ghettos, after the settlements raged, the number of settlers increased, and their violations and crimes multiplied.

Settlement schemes continue and escalate, and the West Bank is witnessing seasons of continuous ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, the Palestinian Jordan Valley, southern Hebron, and other areas in the West Bank through the policy of land confiscation, the establishment of settlements, and the construction of apartheid bypass roads in Palestinian lands, as well as the continuous demolition of homes in occupied Jerusalem and in the designated areas. (C), where the occupation practices systematic displacement, while allowing settlers to build unauthorized in dozens of settlement outposts and enacts racist laws in the Knesset, the latest of which was the abolition of the disengagement law, which allowed settlers to return to 4 settlements. evacuated in the northern West Bank.

On Earth Day this year, as in every year, the Palestinians affirmed their adherence to their land and their high quest to defend it, and commemorate this immortal day amidst a harsh siege of their cities and villages. Many Palestinian towns and villages in different parts of the West Bank carried out activities to commemorate this day when the Palestinians express their Their adherence to their land and their resistance to the Judaizing settlement project that targets it.

Dozens of citizens were injured as a result of the Israeli occupation forces' suppression of these activities in the West Bank, as a result of live and rubber bullets and gas bombs that were heavily thrown at the citizens participating in these activities, which condemn settlements and the continuous Judaization of their lands.

On the occasion of the anniversary of Land Day, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics issued a report in which it said that the year 2022 witnessed a significant increase in the pace of building and expanding Israeli settlements, as the occupation authorities approved about 83 settlement plans to build more than 22,000 settlement units throughout the West Bank, including Jerusalem.

He pointed out that the number of Israeli settlement sites and military bases reached 483 sites until the end of the year 2021 in the West Bank, distributed by 151 settlements, 25 inhabited outposts considered as neighborhoods of existing settlements, 163 outposts outside the settlement borders, and 144 other sites as industrial, tourist and service areas and camps for the occupation army. This is at a time when the occupation authorities and settlers, under the protection of the occupation army, carried out 8,724 attacks against Palestinians and their property during the year 2022, and a total of 378 demolitions, affecting 953 facilities in the West Bank, including the city of Jerusalem. Most of the demolitions were concentrated in the Jerusalem governorate, with 118 demolitions. by 31%.

The Israeli occupation exploits the classification of lands according to the Oslo Accords (A, B, and C) to tighten control over Palestinian lands, especially in areas classified (C), which are completely subject to security, planning and construction issues under the control of the Israeli occupation, as the Israeli occupation directly exploits 76% of the total The area classified as (C), the regional councils of the settlements control 63% of it, while the area of the areas of influence in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank (including the closed areas designated for the expansion of these settlements) amounted to about 537 square kilometers at the end of 2022, representing about 10% of the area. The area of the West Bank, while the areas confiscated for the purposes of military bases and military training sites represent about 18% of the area of the West Bank at 1,016 km2, in addition to the annexation and expansion wall that isolated more than 10% of the area of the West Bank, and more than 219 Palestinian communities were damaged as a result of the construction of The wall, which is about 714 km long, and since 1967, the Israeli occupation authorities have confiscated about 353 thousand dunums of Palestinian lands and classified them as natural reserves in preparation for their seizure.

With regard to settlement construction plans in Jerusalem and other areas of the West Bank, they do not stop, as if they are in a race against time, in an attempt to create new facts that will accelerate the processes of Judaization and Israelization, especially in the Holy City.

The occupation municipality has submitted plans to build thousands of new settlement units in the Holy City, and the plans include projects to build hundreds of homes on the lands of the town of Abu Dis, which is partially located within the borders of the Jerusalem municipality, in addition to more homes in and around the village of Um Tuba, southeast of Jerusalem. in the column header.

The deputy mayor of the far-right occupation, Arbih King, is the driving force behind the new settlement plans, with the support of Jewish investors and private groups, with the help of officials in the occupation municipality. These plans would radically change the demographic character of Jerusalem, and create new friction points in occupied city.

In the town of Abu Dis, the planners intend to build between 250 and 450 new settlement units on two plots of land that a Jewish group claims to be Jewish-owned and dates back to 1920, with the support of the "Ateret Cohanim" organization, which is an extreme right-wing group that buys lands to settle Jewish settlers in particular. In Jerusalem and in the village of "Umm Tuba", where plans are underway to build 400 settlement units, which is the first organized attempt to find a Jewish presence adjacent to the town.

The occupation authorities are also looking forward to opening a completely new settlement neighborhood at the foot of a hill between "Umm Tuba" and the "Gilo" settlement in Jerusalem, and in the "Ras Al-Amud" neighborhood, planners are now looking to add another 140 settlement units to sell to Jewish settlers in two new housing projects.

The rest of the areas are not spared from the settlement monster. In a new settlement plan that isolates the Bedouin communities and perpetuates the suffering of Khirbet Umm al-Khair, the settlement plan, which was announced and deposited with official maps, robs hundreds of dunams from the southeastern side of the lands of the city of Yatta and the lands of Umm al-Khair, and isolates the Bedouin communities in This is an old plan that was revived with the aim of expanding the settlement of "Carmel" and organizing the lands that are seized according to this detailed plan from public buildings, opening streets and facilitating construction for settlers at the expense of private lands, especially in Khirbet Umm al-Khair. And the Hathleen family in particular.

The "Carmel" settlement, which appeared in the early eighties of the last century as a very small settlement outpost, is expanding every day in all directions until the area it controls today has reached about 2,000 dunums, in addition to lands with an area of approximately (6,000) dunums as a vital field.

In the northern Jordan Valley, a group of settlers fenced off pastoral lands in the Abu al-Qandoul area, south of Ain al-Hilweh, in preparation for their seizure. At a time when settlers established a new settlement outpost, on the eastern side of Plain Al-Baqi’a, where three barns were established in the “Al-Hanou” area, and they turned it into an outpost, noting that the settlers had brought a group of cows a week ago to the same area as a prelude to seizing them, and it is expected that For the settlement outpost to seize lands estimated at 1,800 dunums, bearing in mind that these lands are owned by citizens from the town of Tammun.

In the village of Ain al-Bayda, in the northern Jordan Valley, settlers continued digging and repair work in the vicinity of the Ain Bleibel water spring, in preparation for seizing it, noting that this spring is used by citizens to irrigate their crops.

The town of Hawara, south of Nablus, is still the target of attacks and provocations by settlers in order to protect the occupation army, which turned the town into a military barracks. The head of the Northern West Bank Settlement Council, Yossi Dagan, and Member of Knesset Tzivi Sukkot, opened an office for them in "Einabus" square near Hawara, to express, according to their claim, their protest against Not securing the settlers crossing from the place.

The occupation forces closed roads and secondary entrances in the town, and settlers attacked Palestinian homes and vehicles in its streets and attacked Palestinian homes and properties, which led to property damage.
On the other hand, the occupation army approved the request of the "Nakhla" settler organization to allow the settlers to organize the largest demonstration in the northern West Bank in years, on the tenth of April, and dozens of settler organizations will participate in it. Settlement on Mount Sabih in the lands of the town of Beita, and the army will provide guards for the march that takes place in conjunction with the Jewish Passover holiday on the tenth of next April, in which the chief rabbis of the settlers will participate in addition to ministers and Knesset members from the right.

Dozens of Jewish organizations announced their participation in the march, and the participants will call on the Israeli government to fulfill its pledges to allow settlers to return to the "Avitar" outpost, after the Civil Administration completes the process of surveying the land on which it is built.

With the rise of the extreme and fascist right to power in Israel after the recent Knesset elections, more advanced international positions began to take shape in shedding light on the violations and crimes of the occupation and its settlers. The Human Rights Council issued a report on Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories in 1967, including East Jerusalem and the occupied Syrian Golan, in which it stated that settlers live illegally in 279 Israeli settlements and outposts in the occupied West Bank, including 14 settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and that 147 of these settlements were illegal outposts under Israeli domestic law.

The report documented the existence of a relationship between settlement expansion and settler attacks against Palestinians during the past decade, indicating that the United Nations verified 3,372 incidents of settler violence that injured 1,222 Palestinians, and that Israel failed to investigate violent crimes committed by settlers and Israeli forces against Palestinians.

The official concerned with human rights in Palestine, Francesca Albani, also called on the international community to hold Israel accountable and punish it for its actions, according to a press release issued by the United Nations, and the official said in her statement that "the wave of violence that has swept the West Bank since the beginning of this year is the inevitable result of the occupation of Gaza." My repression has no end in sight and the culture of lawlessness and impunity that Israel has nurtured and characterized.”

The European Union also said, according to a statement issued by the Office of the European Union Representative in Palestine, that the Israeli authorities demolished 953 Palestinian homes in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, during 2022, the highest number since 2016.

The union indicated that "953 buildings were demolished or seized in the West Bank, including the city of East Jerusalem, which is the highest number recorded since 2016, and that more than 80 percent of the demolished buildings are located in the classified area (C), and 28 were displaced and damaged." One thousand and 446 people were as a result of the demolitions, and that 101 of the demolished buildings were funded by the European Union, and the number of buildings that were demolished by their owners in East Jerusalem by an Israeli decision jumped from 34 percent in 2021 to 51 percent in 2022.