NOVANEWS
Nazi regime Tuesday morning demolished two residential buildings in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Wadi al-Jouz and al-Issawiya for building without Nazi-issued licenses.
Locals told Ma’an that Nazi forces escorted two excavators to the Wadi al-Jouz neighborhood at 4 am. Nazi soldiers were also deployed throughout the alleys of the neighborhood, before surrounding a three-story building as Nazi regime excavators tore it down.
According to locals, the building consisted of stores on the ground floor, apartments on the second, while the third floor was still under construction.
Local sources highlighted that the stores on the first floor contained food supplies belonging to Palestinian families, adding that Nazi forces demolished the stores without allowing families to remove their supplies.
The demolition occurred after the building was constructed without Nazi-issued building permits, locals said, much like most of East Jerusalem as the process to obtain the permits are often time-consuming and expensive.
After Nazi forces completed the demolition in Wadi al-Jouz, they headed to the neighborhood of al-Issawiya and demolished a residential building, claiming it was lacking Nazi-issued building permits, according to locals.
Member of a local committee in al-Isawiya, Muhammad Abu al-Hummus, told Ma’an that the building was a two-story building, still under construction.
According to Abu al-Hummus, the first floor consisted of commercial stores, while the second served as a residential floor.
A spokesperson for the Jerusalem municipality was not available for immediate comment.
Demolitions in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem have seen an unprecedented surge in recent months, with the number of structures demolished in the first half of 2016 already well exceeding the total number of demolitions carried out in all of 2015.
More than 1,383 Palestinians have been displaced since the beginning of 2016 as a result of demolitions in the occupied territory, compared to 688 Palestinians displaced over the entirety of 2015, according to UN documentation.
Nazi rarely grants Palestinians permits to build in ‘Area C’ of the West Bank — the area under full Zionist security and civilian control — and East Jerusalem, though the Nazi Jerusalem municipality has claimed that compared to the Jewish population, they receive a “disproportionately low number of permit applications from Palestinian communities,” which they boasted “see high approval ratings.”
However, testimonies collected by the Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem (ARIJ) in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan found that the procedures to apply for Nazi-issued building permits were lengthy, sometimes lasting for several years, while the application costs could reach up to 300,000 shekels ($79,180).
As four out of five of Palestinians in East Jerusalem live under the poverty line, applying for costly building permits is nearly impossible, and only seven percent of Jerusalem building permits go to Palestinian neighborhoods.
