Israel turned West Bank into prisons, occupier violence made it battlefield: Palestinian official

Israeli forces have turned the occupied West Bank into “fragmented prisons,” while occupier violence has made it a “battlefield,” Palestinian National Initiative Secretary-General Mustafa Barghouti said Thursday, Anadolu reports.

In a statement, Barghouti said the Israeli army had fragmented the occupied West Bank with more than 1,300 military checkpoints, most of them closed, turning its cities and towns into “fragmented prisons separated from one another.”

He said the restrictions had “severely paralyzed economic activity, education and health services.”

Barghouti said the situation was accompanied by Israeli army raids across all West Bank governorates, mass arrests, continued repression and home demolitions, as well as the prevention of most Palestinian farmers from reaching their land to harvest olives.

“The Israeli occupation uses occupier terror gangs as a spearhead for settlement expansion,” he said.

He added that the groups continued their attacks on towns, villages and cities across the West Bank, turning it into a “battlefield where terror never stops.”

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He said the aim of the “occupier terror war” was to drive Palestinians from most of their land and achieve the “Zionist expansionist dream” of annexation, Judaization and displacement.

Barghouti said the Palestinian people’s steadfastness and determination to remain on their land, alongside popular committees confronting occupiers, constituted “the only factor preventing the implementation of the Israeli plan.”

The Palestinian official urged the international community to stop turning a blind eye to Israeli crimes. He stressed the need to support Palestinian steadfastness by imposing sanctions and a boycott on the entire occupation and settlement system, including the Israeli government.

Attacks by Israeli occupiers and the army against Palestinians and their land in the occupied West Bank have intensified during the olive harvest season.

Palestinian figures indicate that around 750,000 Israeli occupiers live in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, across 194 settlements and approximately 400 outposts.

Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land are considered illegal under international law.

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