Israeli police exclude Palestinian villages from West Bank map

An Israeli police map of the southern West Bank has excluded all Palestinian villages and communities in the area and omitted all written data about the Palestinian population. Only the three main cities are included, revealed Haaretz newspaper on Tuesday. The map shows Palestinian areas as open spaces clear of any construction or inhabitants.

The Kiryat Arba-Hebron police department, which printed the map in 2014, is responsible for the entire southern West Bank region including the Bethlehem area. The departmental map shows the names of the three major cities in the area — Bethlehem, Halhul and Hebron — but includes all the Israeli settlements, except the unauthorised (even by the Israeli government) outposts. All settlements, “authorised” or not, are illegal under international law.

More than 200 Palestinian villages and communities are excluded from the map, which lists the area’s population as 81,000 with a note that the figure does not include Palestinians. Furthermore, the map claims that 99.6 per cent of the inhabitants are Jews and only 0.4 per cent are from other religions. In fact, there are 811,000 Palestinians living in 99 towns in the area, easily outnumbering the illegal Jewish settler-colonists.

Haaretz pointed out that the data available on the police website differs from that on the map. The former claims that the Kiryat Arba-Hebron police department has a mandate over an area of 1,600 square kilometres, and not 1,470 as per the map. In addition, according to the website there are 32 Jewish settlements in the region but only 28 are shown on the map, with a population of 62,000 people.