Israel evacuates 21 Palestinian families for military training in Jordan Valley

Israeli occupation authorities delivered evacuation notices to 21 Palestinian families in the Jordan Valley area of the northern occupied West Bank late Thursday night, in order to make way for active military training.

Locals told Ma’an that Israeli occupation forces delivered notices to 21 families in Khirbet Humsa, in the Tubas district, ordering them to evacuate their homes from 6am to 8pm for military training in the area.

Palestinian residents of the Jordan Valley regularly face evacuations and interruption due to Israeli military exercises on or near their land. The district of Tubas, meanwhile, is one of the occupied West Bank’s most important agricultural centres.

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The majority of the Jordan Valley is under full Israeli military control, despite being within the West Bank. Meanwhile, at least 44 per cent of the total land in the Jordan Valley has been reappropriated by Israeli forces for military purposes and training exercises.

According to the Palestinian Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem (ARIJ), more than 400,000 dunams (98,842 acres) of the 720,000 dunams (177,916 acres) that make up the total area of the Jordan Valley has been transformed into closed military and firing zones, with at least 27,000 dunams (6,672 acres) confiscated for illegal Israeli settlement building.