A Palestinian man was attempting to stop work by an Israeli bulldozer during a protest outside the village of Deir Qaddis, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, while activists and residents prevented Israeli bulldozers from leveling agricultural land owned by Palestinians on Wednesday morning, according to locals.
The coordinator for the Nilin resistance committee Muhammad Amirah said that the committee, along with the village’s local council and the popular committee to resist settlements and the wall, managed to stop Israeli bulldozers that had been leveling the land for the past four days in order to expand Israel’s 446 road which connects Israel’s illegal settlements to the rest of Israel.
Amirah said that Israeli forces, accompanied by bulldozers, left the area after activists and residents staged a protest against the destruction of the agricultural lands.
The Israeli occupation bulldozers knocked down two Palestinian family homes in Jabal al-Mukabir area, to the southeast of Occupied Jerusalem.
Israeli bulldozers demolished the 100-square-meter home of the Palestinian citizen Amer Aweisat without prior notifications and under the pretext of unlicensed construction. Abu Sakran’s 120-meter-square family home was also reduced to rubble in the process. Several Palestinian civilians had their homes destroyed by the Israeli occupation authorities without prior notices over the past few years.
Israeli forces also reportedly handed out parking tickets to Palestinian journalists in an attempt to keep them from entering the area.
According to locals, an Israeli settler also ran over a Palestinian teenager in the area at the time of the protest. He is reportedly in moderate condition. However, the details of the incident remained unknown as of Wednesday.
A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more remote than ever, with the risk of generations of violence and radicalism unless leaders act, the United Nations’ most senior official in the region said on Wednesday.
In his first public comments since the publication on July 1 of a report by the Quartet of Middle East mediators, the UN’s special coordinator for the region, Nickolay Mladenov, said the situation was approaching a point of no return.
