The war against Gaza City has overshadowed repercussions since last Saturday, October 7, 2023 on Hebron City in general, and the Old City in particular.
The General Director of Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC), Mr. Emad Hamdan, noted that the occupation authorities and the settlers’ ambitions to separate the Old City from Hebron City, Judaize, and annex the area to the settlement compound, which is called “the regional council of the settlements in Mount Hebron”, a project that has been prepared for several years, that is by isolating a large geographical area of the Old City, starting from “Kiryat Arbaa” settlement in the east, through Wad Alhussein, Jaber, Al-Salaymeh, AlSahla, the Ibrahimi Mosque, and Al-Shuhahda Street Neighborhoods, ending in Tal Rumaida area in the west. These areas have been surrounded with military gates and concrete road blocks, as well as isolating them from their social and geographical vicinity, and forcing military orders and regulations that control access in and out of them and the citizens’ movements there.
Mr. Hamdan also added “once the incidents and events started happening in Gaza Strip, the occupation authorities accelerated exploiting opportunities to execute its Judaization settlement scheme through forcing a curfew on the population of the blockaded areas and isolating them”. The curfew has caused inability to the population to work and practice their daily matters, and preventing the access of the humanitarian organizations and the medical teams to them. This unjust blockade by the occupation army lasted over the past days without paying attention to the citizens’ suffering, or fulfilling their basic humanitarian needs by providing food, medicine, baby milk, and cooking gas, etc. Disregarding these humanitarian needs, which are considered a human right sat forth in all the international conventions and laws.
The citizens called upon the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), and the General Authority of Civil Affairs to urgently intervene to provide help and aid for them, and to end this unjustified blockade on their residence areas. Mr. Hamdan said that the blockaded areas have witnessed since the first day of the curfew assaults and attacks by the Israeli settlers on the citizens and their properties, where they punctured the citizens’ car tires, threw stones on the Palestinian houses, attack the citizens by hitting them, and smashing their cell phones. Not to mention at the time when the occupation army placed more military checkpoints to suffocate the area and its Palestinian population, it also attempted to close the Ibrahimi Mosque in the face of the Muslim worshippers. Alongside with disruption of all the restoration and maintenance projects in the Palestinian houses that Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC) is implementing in these blockaded areas in the Old City, and has been prohibited from accessing them.
Mr. Hamdan called upon the humanitarian and human rights organizations due to the necessity of the urgent intervention, in order to put an end to the occupation’s blockade and arbitrary measures against the innocent citizens in the Old City of Hebron as a mass punishment of the Palestinians wherever existed.