Home Demolitions: An Israeli policy
Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes built without permits continued around Israeli installations in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, displacing hundreds. Building permits were almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain, and according to Israeli officials as many as three thousand homes in the West Bank could be subject to demolition. At the same time Israel targeted Palestinian homes for destruction, Israel authorized massive housing construction, tax incentives, and roads and related infrastructure for Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Government approval of new construction often immediately followed attacks by Palestinians on settlers, as in the decision in August to expand the Yitzhar and Tel Rumeida settlements, and to allot NIS 90 million to build new settlements and expand existing ones. In response to a survey in August by Peace Now that found 5,892 new units under construction in 142 settlements, while 2,888 completed units stood empty, the Housing Ministry admitted that almost a quarter of all units built by the government in the West Bank between 1989 and 1992 had never been occupied.
Israel's home demolition policy is inhumane, unjust and implemented to serve its own political motives. It is part of a larger strategy to turn the West Bank into an apartheid-like patchwork of disjointed Palestinian "self-rule" cantons surrounded by Jewish colonies, bypass roads and army bases that Israel intends to annex as part of any final settlement. The Israeli legal system, and at its head the Israeli High Court, sanctions the discriminatory use of the building regulations and fails to put an end to the application of unjust administrative and legal regulations.
Israel's home demolition policy also violates the letter and the spirit of the Oslo Accords which state, "neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the final status negotiations". The continuation of this policy drives more and more Palestinians into homelessness and poverty and causes widespread resentment and bitterness towards the "peace process". Israeli should put an end to home demolition and cancel all outstanding home demolition orders. A reasonable legal framework for home building should be instituted in the West Bank at once to serve until all questions of sovereignty and land possession there are resolved.