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| EU losing patience with Israel |
Israel has sped up demolitions of EU-funded and Palestinian
structures in the West Bank amid hawkish talk on taking over the
territory.
It wrecked or seized 97 structures worth some €480,000 in the area
last year which had been built using EU or member states' funds - a 90
percent increase on the year before, according to internal EU figures
seen by EUobserver.
It also demolished 35 percent more Palestinian structures and displaced
95 percent more Palestinian people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem
than in 2018.
And the trend is set to continue this year, if Israel's right-wing defence minister, Naftali Bennet, gets his way.
"The state of Israel will do everything to ensure that these
territories will be part of the state of Israel," he said at an event in
Jerusalem last week, referring to Area C, a vast swathe of the West
Bank which belongs to Palestine, the UN says, but which remains under
Israeli military jurisdiction since Israel conquered it in 1967.
"We are not at the United Nations," he said, according to Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post.
"We are embarking on a real and immediate battle for the future of the land of Israel and the future of Area C," he added.
But the EU foreign service said: "Demolitions and seizures of
humanitarian assets are contrary to Israel's obligations under
international law".
"Our focus remains on the halt of the demolitions, confiscations, and
of settlement construction and expansion and on the humanitarian
protection of the most vulnerable populations," it added.
"On a number of occasions, often in coordination with the EU member
states, the EU has called for the restitution and/or compensation of
EU-funded humanitarian assets which have been demolished, dismantled, or
confiscated by Israel," it also said.
The EU, Germany, France, and the UK issued statements condemning the
latest surge in Israeli settlements in the region on 9 January.
The West Bank and Gaza are meant to form a future Palestinian state,
with Jerusalem as a shared capital with Israel, according to the EU and
UN formula for ending the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict.
But Israeli settlers, more than 630,000 of whom have moved to the
conquered lands since 1967, have already broken up the West Bank into
small cantons, making the two-state solution look increasingly less
possible.
And recent US policy U-turns - moving its embassy to Jerusalem and
saying that the Israeli settlements were not illegal - have also harmed
EU conflict resolution.
"Israel's settlement policy seriously undermines the viability of the
two-state solution and the prospect for a lasting peace," the EU
foreign service said.
The Israeli mission to the EU did not respond to EUobserver's questions.
Read more at: Surge in Israeli demolition of EU-funded buildings
