Alghadeer TV Alghadeer TV
Israeli forces demolished a cluster of Palestinian homes near a military barrier on the outskirts of Jerusalem on Monday, in the face of protests and international criticism.
Israel said the 10 apartment buildings, most of them still under construction, had been built illegally and posed a security risk to Israeli armed forces operating along the barrier that runs through the occupied West Bank.
U.N. officials, who had called on Israel to halt the demolition plans, said 17 Palestinians faced displacement.
Bulldozers accompanied by hundreds of Israeli police and soldiers moved into Sur Baher, a Palestinian village on the edge of East Jerusalem in an area that Israel captured and occupied, along with the West Bank, in the 1967 Middle East War.
Palestinians fear that the razing of buildings near what Israel describes as a security barrier against Palestinian attacks will set a precedent for other towns along its route, which snakes through the West Bank for hundreds of kilometers.
The demolition is part of the latest round of protracted wrangling over the future of Jerusalem, home to more than 500,000 Israelis and 300,000 Palestinians.
Israeli forces cut through a wire section of the barrier in Sur Baher under cover of darkness early on Monday, and began clearing residents, before bulldozers and mechanical tore down homes.
Palestinian owners said their buildings lay within areas run by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank under the Oslo interim peace deals with Israel.
