Violent clashes erupt after Israel closes Palestinian school

Rasa - A series of fierce clashes have broken out between Palestinian protesters and Israeli forces after the Tel Aviv regime ordered the closure of a Palestinian school in the occupied West Bank.

News ID: 441064

Date: 16 October 2018 - 13:23

RNA - The clashes erupted after students tried to enter the school alongside some local officials in the town of Sawiyah, south of Nablus, on Monday morning.

Israeli troops and police fired tear gas at protesters, including into the school premises.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said that at least four people were hit by rubber bullets, with a number of others affected by tear gas. An AFP photographer was among those injured in the clashes.

The school serves the Palestinian villages of as-Sawiya and al-Lubban south of Nablus and is located on a main road through the West Bank.

Samer Ewass, a village official, said they were protesting the Israeli decision.

"We reject this decision," Ewass   said, adding, "These children have a right to education, they have a right to sit in school like any child in any country."

The Israeli military on Sunday issued an order for the school to be closed.  The Israeli army blamed students for throwing stones at a nearby major road used by its forces and Israeli settlers.

Dozens of Palestinian students were injured after armed Israeli settlers and soldiers raided a high school in the occupied West Bank on October 11.

In late August, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), an international organization said that Palestinian children in the occupied territories were simply being denied education as the Israeli regime kept on with the much-blamed policy of demolishing their newly constructed schools.

The NRC says some 55 schools in the occupied West Bank are threatened with demolition and stop-work orders by Israeli authorities, most of them built with funding from the European Union member states and other donors.

The EU has already announced that some 100 structures, including homes, shelters, water networks and schools, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds have been destroyed or confiscated over the past year.

Many believe that the controversial demolition measures adopted by Tel Aviv are aimed at expelling more Palestinians from the West Bank.

According to Press TV, Israel was created in 1948 after a Western-backed military seizure of vast expanses of Arab territories. In 1967, Israel occupied the entire West Bank, including East al-Quds, during full-frontal military operations. It later annexed the territories. Upon annexation, it also began propping up settlements, deemed as illegal by the international community due to their construction on occupied territory.

Neither move has ever been recognized by the international community. Since then, Tel Aviv has also been changing the territory’s demography by displacing concentrations of Palestinian populations either entirely or on a piecemeal basis.

More than 600,000 Israelis now live in over 230 settlements. Tel Aviv has defied calls to stop settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories.

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