Field Briefing: EAPPI Team Visits Cremisan

The society of St. Yves Catholic Center for Human Rights accompanied a delegation from the EAPPI Program on a field trip to Cremisan and Beir Onah, to brief them on Israeli policies of settlement expansion and linkage, and the annexation wall which serves as one of the main tools achieve such policies.

 

The EAPPI delegation was briefed on the settlement policy in general and its impact on the Bethlehem governorate in particular. The delegation also visited the Cremisan sisters ‘Convent where they learnt about the legal case against the construction of the annexation wall, and the latest developments pertaining to it. The accompanying delegation also met with some landowners who lost their lands due to the construction of the annexation wall and have become isolated it. They landowners gave live witness of their daily suffering as a result of Israeli land grab policies, including building the annexation wall, which has caused them to not only lose their lands and access to them, but also lose a major source of income and livelihood, with the final aim of creating a coercive environment for Palestinians to forcibly displace them. The delegation concluded its field tour with a visit to the site of residential buildings which had been demolished by the Israeli occupation forces earlier this year while they were under construction in the area of Beir Onah.

 

The delegation was briefed about Israeli house demolitions policies as a tool of forcible displacement, both in Jerusalem and in areas C of the occupied Palestinian territory, where the Israeli government maintains arbitrary planning policies to limit Palestinian construction and systematically demolishes homes and structures, while sponsoring and promoting illegal settlement policies, allowing them to expand unhindered on the very same Palestinian lands where it restricts Palestinian growth and building, thus flagrantly violating international law and international humanitarian law.