Thursday, February 02, 2006

10,000 illegal Arab living units in Jerusalem

This article from IMRA, Wednesday, February 1, 2006, by Justus Reid Weiner, puts the forced evacuation of 9 illegal Jewish living units in Amona into a different perspective...

At a conference that took place on January 7, 2002, at the Jerusalem Center for Women, Hatem Abed El-Khader Eid, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council representing the Jerusalem district, proudly announced that, during the last four years, Palestinians have erected 6,000 homes without building permits, out of which only 198 were demolished.

... Eid declared, "we in the Palestinian Authority are willing to build ten homes for every house demolished by Israel". According to a report in the newspaper Ha'tsofeh, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the PA are among the sources of funding for the wave of illegal construction in Jerusalem.

In sum, the knowledgeable sources all agree that thousands of illegal units are going up. Extrapolating from the assessments, the number might well exceed 10,000 if the tally were to begin five or ten years ago.

Also refer to a Wednesday, February 5, 2003 posting on IMRA: "Illegal Construction in Jerusalem: A Variation on an Alarming Global Phenomenon"

1 comment:

3pillars said...

Of the 198 illegal Palestinian homes demolished, were the soldiers and police as brutal as they were in Amona? It is trully troubling when we treat our enemies better than our brethren.