GAZA CITY, March 16, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) � Israel
is planning to build a new separation wall around the Gaza Strip just to
grab more Palestinian territories, Palestinian experts warned on
Wednesday, March 16.
�The wall will be built along the eastern and northern
Gaza borders toward Beit Hanun and the southern borders toward Rafah,�
professor Naem Baroud, the head of the Geography Department in the
Gaza-based Islamic University, told IslamOnline.net.
The new Israeli wall will be established in parallel
to the barbed wire Israel had built to divide the strip from the
Palestinian land occupied in 1948 (what is now Israel).
The Palestinian expert warned that the new Israeli
wall, besides gobbling vast swathes of land, will devastate farmlands and
underground water resources.
Israel claimed that the new wall will be built to
maintain security of the Israeli settlements adjacent to the
strip.
The new wall will incorporate state-of-the art
security measures such as surveillance cameras, electronic radars, warning
and communications systems, and remote-controlled ambushes.
The construction of the new wall shall complete before
the proposed Israeli withdrawal from Gaza scheduled to begin on July 20
this year.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon�s �disengagement�
plan centers on dismantling all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip along
with four other outposts in the West Bank.
Israeli Violation
Baroud said the new wall violates the 1949
Rodos agreement on drawing the armistice lines between Israel and the
Arab countries.
Following they engaged in war in 1948, Arab countries
and Israel held talks on the Greek Island of Rodos in 1949 to conclude a
permanent truce.
�Israel violated the armistice lines and usurped
pieces of land in the strip, especially in the areas of Absan, Bani
Sohaila, Khuzaa and Al-Qarara,� Baroud said.
�The Palestinians are even barred from reaching the
areas around the Israeli barbed wire, though the land is owned by
Palestinians.�
Israel has set up the barbed wire around the Strip
following the Oslo agreement in 1993 with the Palestinian
Authority.
More Suffering
Kamal Al-Bughdadi, the head of the Bureij
municipality, warned that the wall will increase the suffering of the
Palestinian people.
�They (Israelis) want to build a new wall similar to
the one they are building in the West Bank in order to make matters worse
for the Palestinians,� he told IOL.
�Israel has already annexed Palestinian territories in
the Bureij area when they built the barbed wire.�
Bughdadi also warned that there were no official
Palestinian cadastral maps on the 1949 armistice lines to be used in
defining the Gaza borders.
�The Palestinian Authority is to blame for that,� he
said.
The first Palestinian atlas was launched Saturday,
March 12, to document for the generations to come territories usurped and
occupied by Israeli troops and keep the cause vivid.
Up to 50,000 maps charting Palestinian sites that date
back to 1799 are found in the English-language geographical
encyclopedia.
The 600-km-long barrier has resulted in the
confiscation of 11,4000 donums (2,850 acres - 1,140 hectares) of
privately-owned Palestinian land and in the destruction of 102,320 trees,
according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(UNOCHA).
It will eventually snake some 900 kilometers along the
West Bank and leave even larger swathes of its territory on the Israeli
side.
The OCHA estimated that with the completion of the
wall, 30 percent of the West Bank population, or some 680,000 people, will
be �directly harmed.�
