Israel Reopens Hebron Road After 5 Months Of Closure

Hebron, 1 Rajab 1437/ 8 April 2016 (MINA) – The Israeli authorities on Thursday reopened a road in eastern Hebron city, five months after it was first sealed as part of severe Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement in the divided city.

The head of the Palestinian military liaison, Col. Muhammad Eteiwi, said in a statement that after pressuring the Israeli authorities, his team had been able to secure the opening of the road leading to the Shuhada al-Haram School in the Jabal Jawhar area of Hebron’s H2 zone.

The road was sealed with dirt mounds more than five months ago amid severe Israeli security measures, the statement said. It noted that it had been previously reopened for a month before being sealed again. Maan reported.

A spokesperson for the Hebron activist group Youth Against Settlements told Ma’an that residents of Hebron face some 100 obstacles to movement in the town, and many other streets that remain closed are more important than the road reopened Thursday. He added that the closures amount to the “collective punishment” of Palestinians in Hebron.

Hebron has seen severe movement restrictions since a wave of popular unrest swept the occupied Palestinian territory last October, with the city’s central Tel Rumeida neighborhood turned into closed military zone in November.

Even before that, however, Hebron was a sharply divided city, separated into Palestinian and Israeli-controlled zones — known as H1 and H2 — in 1997, prompted by a massacre carried out by a US-born Israeli settler inside the Old City’s Ibrahimi Mosque several years earlier.

Around 800 Israeli settlers lived in Hebron’s Old City, surrounded by some 30,000 Palestinians and living under the protection of Israeli forces.

In recent days, there has been a marked decrease in violence across the occupied Palestinian territory, with no Palestinian or Israeli deaths in nearly two weeks. (T/hna/R03 )

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)