Israeli settlers, police clash during outpost eviction

JERUSALEM, 18 Jun 2018 [Fik/News Sources]: Nearly a dozen Israeli police officers were injured in clashes on Sunday as they began evicting Jewish settlers from an outpost in the occupied West Bank, police said.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said that 11 officers were “injured lightly” during the eviction of 10 buildings in the Tapuah West outpost in the northern West Bank.

Israel’s supreme court had in February 2017 ruled that part of the settlement outpost must be removed since it was built on private Palestinian land. According to Rosenfeld, six protesters were arrested.

Honenu, a pro-settler legal advocacy group, said 40 youths were removed from the area by police. One was said to be lightly injured.

Rosenfeld said the eviction was expected to last the entire day.

On Tuesday, police evicted settlers from 15 homes in a separate outpost north of the West Bank city of Hebron that was deemed illegal.

All Israeli settlements are viewed as illegal under international law, but Israel differentiates between those it has approved and those it has not.

Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War. Settlements there are seen as major stumbling blocks to a peace deal since they are built on land the Palestinian wants for their future state.

Some 600,000 Israeli settlers live among nearly 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

US peace efforts ‘doomed to fail’

US efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are “doomed to fail,” the Palestinian Authority, which has frozen contacts with Washington because of its perceived bias, said on Saturday.

PA spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told reporters that a regional tour next week by White House adviser Jared Kushner and US President Donald Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East, Jason Greenblatt, would produce “no results.”

According to Israeli media, they will visit Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

“Without respect for Arab summit resolutions and those of the UN Security Council... and especially without the accord of the Palestinian people... (US peace efforts) will be doomed to fail and will destabilize the region,” Abu Rudeina said.

The Palestinians reacted furiously to Trump’s announcement in December recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving his country’s embassy there from Tel Aviv.

They consider east Jerusalem their future capital, insisting the future of the disputed city is an issue to be negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The US Embassy was opened on May 14, one day before the Palestinians commemorate their mass displacement in the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.