PA Campaign to Create New Facts on the Ground in Samaria

By Dalit Halevy

Ahead of 'settlement war crime' lawsuit at ICC, PA in Shechem planting trees and caravans to cut off Jewish towns.

Arab leaders in the Shechem (Nablus) region of Samaria are escalating their efforts against the Jewish communities of the area, less than two weeks before the Palestinian Authority (PA) is to submit a "war crimes" lawsuit against Israel at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for its activity in Judea and Samaria.
The PA's Palestinian Organization for the Struggle Against Settlements has recently launched a new campaign called "advancement towards the mountains," which is meant to cut off the natural growth of the Jewish communities towards Arab towns in the rural village area in southern Shechem.
As part of the campaign, Arab residents placed caravans on the mountains adjacent to the towns Jamma'in and Huwara.
Rasan Daglas, a PA official who leads the organization in the Shechem region, told the Hamas paper Palestine on Sunday that the goal of the new campaign is to demonstrate the commitment of the residents to the land in light of the "daily crimes of the occupation settlers," who he said were trying to expel the Arab residents.
Daglas added that the organization has decided to place caravans on the hilltops and "threatened" land, in a fight to control the strategic lay of the land.
According to the official, activists will arrive at more than 200 sites in the area to plant trees and set up caravans to establish new facts on the ground.
Despite the PA claims to the contrary, the 2012 Levy Report conclusively proved that the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, the Biblical heartland of Israel, is completely legal according to international law given prior international agreements to the Jewish residents and the fact that the area was never annexed by Jordan when it occupied the region between 1948 and 1967.