Israeli military bulldozers tore down about 50 Palestinian-owned shops on the outskirts of al‑Eizariya, southeast of Jerusalem, on Tuesday, the largest recent single-day clearance for a road project that Israel says will ease congestion but that Palestinian officials and rights groups call a move to cement Israeli control over the E1 corridor in the occupied West Bank.
The demolitions came less than a week after some shop owners received evacuation notices for structures the Israeli military says were built without permits. Attorneys for the owners appealed up to Israel’s Supreme Court, but the demolitions went ahead. COGAT, the Israeli military body responsible for civil affairs in the West Bank, said the buildings — which included car washes, scrap metal yards and vegetable stands — “obstructed construction of the planned road to connect Palestinian towns” and that owners had been warned for “several years” that enforcement was forthcoming.
Palestinian leaders and Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now say the road is part of a larger infrastructure plan that will funnel Palestinian traffic onto a bypass network while a parallel highway serves Israeli settlements. “The shops that were demolished are where Israel is planning to build a new road that will divert all Palestinian traffic to that road so that they can close down the whole area of E1 for Palestinians,” said Hagit Ofran, Peace Now’s director.
The E1 project is especially sensitive because it runs from the outskirts of Jerusalem deep into the occupied West Bank. Both Israeli officials and settlement critics acknowledge that developing it would make a contiguous Palestinian state much harder to realize by isolating the cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem and hindering north‑south movement. Israel recently announced plans to build about 3,500 settlement apartments adjacent to the existing settlement of Maale Adumim in the same corridor.
Mohammad Abu Ghalieh, a 48‑year‑old shop owner, watched his livelihood erased in a matter of hours. “Forty-eight years of night and day to build something for his children and himself, and in one day and one night, everything was gone,” he said. Daoud al‑Jahalin, the head of a nearby village council, said more than 200 families would lose their incomes as a result of the demolitions.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war. The international community overwhelmingly considers Israeli settlement construction in the occupied territory to be illegal and an obstacle to peace. Palestinians say proper building permits are nearly impossible to obtain from Israeli authorities even as settlements expand rapidly, a dynamic that rights groups say forces many residents to build without authorization.