SPOKESWOMAN: PRAWER PLAN WILL MARK A SECOND NAKBA

          Gaza City, 27 Muharram 1435/1 December 2013 (MINA) – Isra al-modallal, a spokewoman for the Palestinian Government, called on the Israeli government to call off Prawer-Begin Plan aimed at the expulsion of tens of thousands of the Arab Bedouin community in the Naqab Area.

          Modallal said the plan, if implemented, would mark yet another chapter of Nakba (catastrophe) being a replica of the ethnic cleansing acts carried out prior to the 1948 occupation of Palestine, ALRAY, Palestinian Media Agency quoted by Mi’raj News Agency (MINA) as reporting.

          Following is the text of the press release read out by Mrs Modallal:

Prawer Plan Won’t Pass

          We are holding this press conference to promote justice; to send a message of support to the ethnic cleansing-threatened Arab Bedouin community in the Naqab area in the south of historic occupied Palestine.

          We are gathering to voice our rejection of the discriminatory Prawer-Begin Plan, approved by the Israeli occupation government in September 2011 and passed the first Knesset reading in June 2013, for the mass expulsion of the Arab Bedouin community in the Naqab area.

          Israeli occupation, under Prawer-Begin Plan, intends to destroy 35 Arab Bedouin villages, forcibly displace up to 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens of it, dispossess their historical lands in the Naqab, in a scenario replicating the 1948 Nakba.

          Following the approval of the plan in 2011, the occupation government announced plans to displace over 10,000 people and plant forests, build military centers, and establish new settler houses in their place.

          The Israeli occupation policy of ethnic cleansing dates back to the early decades of Israel’s age. Prior to the foundation of Israel, 100,000 Palestinian Bedouin were living in the Naqab area. Following the 1948 Nakba, there were only about 11,000 Bedouin citizens that remained in the area.

          Since then, the nascent state of the Israeli occupation has been considering the villages “unrecognized” and the inhabitants “trespassers on state land” and thus denying the citizens access to basic services like water, electricity, sewage, education, health care and roads.

          We, in the Palestinian Government, join the calls of the international community and human rights groups for cancelling this plan, which grossly violates the constitutional rights of the Arab Bedouin citizens to property, dignity, equality, adequate housing, and freedom to choose their own residence, before it becomes law.

         Today, we salute the Palestinian masses in the occupied Palestinian territories and in Diaspora and the freemen worldwide who are down the streets protesting against the second chapter of Nakba. (T/P02/E1)

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)