The Israeli occupation army has demolished 218 Palestinian houses over the past ten months, a human rights group said.

“The Israeli occupation has formally backtracked on its plans to annex the West Bank, but the demolition figures indicate that on the ground, reality remains unchanged and the de-facto annexation continues,” the advocacy group explained in a report on Wednesday.

The demolition of Palestinian houses by the Israeli occupation army has surged by more than 200 per cent in 2020, the human rights organisation stressed.    

Over the past ten months, the Israeli occupation army displaced 798 Palestinian citizens, including 404 minors – the highest year on record since the NGO group started collecting data in 2016 – compared with 677 Palestinians in 2019, 379 in 2018, and 521 in 2017.

According to the report, the Israeli occupation knocked down 301 Palestinian non-residential and infrastructure facilities, including water wells and pipelines and electricity grids, which are crucial to health and sanitation amid the outbreak of the coronavirus.      

On the eve of US presidential elections, two Israeli military bulldozers and diggers, escorted by Israeli occupation forces, broke into Khirbet Humsah hamlet in the northern Jordan Valley and razed 18 tents and a structure where 74 Palestinian citizens, including 41 minors, used to live.

The Israeli occupation army, in addition, demolished 29 tents, a cattle shed, three warehouses, nine tents used as kitchens, ten portable toilets, two solar panels, 23 water containers, and ten livestock pens.

More than 30 tons of fodder for livestock were destroyed and two cars and a tractor were also confiscated by Israeli occupation forces.

The human rights organisation confirmed that the Israeli occupation has facilitated the implantation of its policy to reduce the Palestinian presence in lands that it is seeking to take over.

In 2020, the Israeli occupation authorities have appropriated 242 Palestinian prefabricated houses, compared with only six prefabs in 2015.

The Israeli occupation army also seized nearly 700 tractors and diggers and chopped down about 7,500 Palestinian trees in Area C of the occupied West Bank.