TEL AVIV, January 13 (RIA Novosti) – Israeli police evicted Palestinian activists from a tent village they had set up on a West Bank site designated as the area for a new Jewish settlement, Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said on Sunday.
The Israeli police evicted over 100 protesters from the site near Jerusalem known as E-1 early on Sunday morning on instruction from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who ordered to disperse the Palestinians.
Palestinians say Israel’s plans to build thousands of housing units as part of the E-1 project would cut off Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods from the West Bank and make it difficult for the Palestinians to create a cohesive state.
The Israeli settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories is the main obstacle for the resumption of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which has been stalled for more than a year.
The Palestinians are seeking to create an independent state on the territories of West Bank, East Jerusalem, partially occupied by Israel, and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and want Israel to pull from the Palestinian territories occupied after the 1967 war.
Israel, however, has refused to return to the 1967 borders and is unwilling to raise the issue of Jerusalem, which it says is the indivisible capital of the Jewish state.
