Settlement Freeze: about as face-saving as a false moustache
It doesn’t look good to be “negotiating” with thieves while they are actually, in plain sight, loading up your goods onto a removal van, so to speak. So while Washington manoeuvred, pressured and bribed PA leaders Abbas, Erekat of the Palestine Authority into a fresh round of Two State carve-up talks, for 10 months a freeze was declared on new settlement building. This ended in the last week of September, and since then the headlines have been full of the politicking around extending it.
During the 10-month “freeze”:
* 120 illegal Israeli colonies were expanded
* 1520 housing units were built
* more Palestinian land was usurped, agricultural land was destroyed
* 280 Palestinian homes/buildings were demolished.
* 13 Palestinian homes were seized by extremist settlers. Two days after the freeze ended, the Israeli High Court ruled that settlers could evict tens more Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem
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