Ramallah, November 14 (QNA) - The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission (CWRC) has flagged 11 Israeli colonial expansion plans involving 895 additional housing units across the occupied West Bank, warning of a threefold push to expand settlements, seize more land for industrial and commercial use, and entrench infrastructure that facilitates further dispossession.
The plans span Qalqilya, Salfit, Nablus, Ramallah, Al-Bireh and Hebron, as well as the Gush Etzion Regional Council area in the southern West Bank. They combine residential expansion with industrial and commercial development, changes to land-use designations and expanded building rights.
In its weekly monitoring report, the CWRC identified a broader pattern involving the conversion of agricultural and open land, the expansion of settlement infrastructure and the creation of economic interests that make further expansion increasingly entrenched. Their cumulative impact, it warned, could reconstitute the territorial landscape to the detriment of Palestinian communities.
The threefold strategy is also a harbinger of deeper dispossession. By fragmenting Palestinian territory into disconnected cantons, the plans fuel concerns over cantonization and the erosion of contiguous Palestinian communities.
This massive expansion risks accelerating Palestinian effacement while putting Palestinian prospects for geographic continuity and development in harm's way, the commission warned.
The CWRC said the combined plans reflect a sustained effort to consolidate the colonial presence and reshape land use to secure its long-term expansion, kindling further pressure on Palestinian land and undermining Palestinian rights and their future on their own territory. (QNA)