Abbas: Settlement expansion ‘an assault against our people’

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday slammed a new Israeli law legalizing dozens of Jewish outposts built on private Palestinian land and renewed Israeli settlement expansion as an “assault against our people.”

The Hamas and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror groups also condemned the law, which passed in the Knesset on Monday.

Israel has faced broad international criticism over the law, including from Britain, France, the United Nations and neighboring Jordan. The United States has not commented.

Since the election of US President Donald Trump, Israel has also announced the construction of some 6,000 new settlement homes and announced the first new settlement in decades.

Abbas said the law was illegal and was “obviously against the wishes of the international community.”

Speaking alongside Abbas at a press conference in Paris, French President Francois Hollande said: “I want to believe that Israel and its government will reconsider this law.”

Responding to Israel’s law, Hamas — the de facto rulers of the Gaza Strip — said Israel’s “presence on any inch of Palestinian soil is illegitimate.”

The terror group called the new legislation “organized terrorism,” and said is “a dangerous attempt at changing the demography and strengthening the pillars of the racist, extremist Jewish state.”

The statement posted by the Gaza-based terror group on their official website added: “We call on all factions and components of Palestinian society on all levels to take immediate action and steps to confront Israeli encroachment on Palestinian land.”

View of caravan houses in the illegal West Bank outpost of Amona on January 16, 2017. (Lior Mizrahi/Flash90)

Meanwhile, Hezbollah called for Palestinian “resistance” in response to the law, using a euphemism for violence.

“The resistance taken by the Palestinian people in the face of the occupiers is the only effective choice to break the will of the Zionists and the eliminate their dream of expansion, and to prevent them from changing the real identity of Arab land on all the soil of Palestine from the sea to the river,” Hezbollah said in a statement published on its affiliate news site al-Manar.

“That Israel can continue to put its hands on Palestinian land is a mark of shame for all forces who claim to seek peace in the region,” Hezbollah added.

The terror group also slammed the international community, which it said “does not take practical action to punish [Israel] and prevent it from continuing to violate international law and human rights.”

The Knesset late Monday passed the so-called Regulation Law, which allows the appropriation of parcels of private Palestinian land for Israeli settlement outposts in the West Bank, in a move the Palestinians condemned as a means to “legalize theft.”

The new law will allow Israel to appropriate Palestinian private land on which Israelis had built outposts without knowing it was private property, if they received government support for the move.

The Palestinian landowners will be compensated financially or with other land.

The law could still be challenged, with Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman saying last week it was certain to be struck down by the High Court.

UN envoy for the Middle East peace process Nickolay Mladenov said the bill set a “very dangerous precedent.”

“This is the first time the Israeli Knesset legislates in the occupied Palestinian lands and particularly on property issues,” he told AFP.

“That crosses a very thick red line.”