RAMALLAH: A Catholic monastery and convent in a secluded valley outside Bethlehem lost a seven-year legal battle against the building of Israel’s separation wall on its land yesterday, according to its lawyers.
The Society of St Yves, a Catholic human rights group which argued the case on the monastery’s behalf, said an Israeli appeals court had endorsed a plan to expand the barrier it had built in the area. The wall would surround the convent on three sides and cut it off from most of its land, St Yves said in a statement.
Salesian monks and nuns tend lush vineyards and olive trees on terraced hillsides under the gaze of Israeli settlements there. A convent school teaches 400 local children. Israel started building the barrier, a mix of metal fencing, barbed wire and concrete walls, in 2002 in response to a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings. It says the barrier keeps its citizens safe from militants.
St Yves argued “that the plan would violate international law and conventions protecting religious minorities and the right to education and freedom of religion”, said Anica Heinlein, its advocacy officer.
Around 50,000 Palestinian Christians, including 17,000 Catholics, live among four million Muslims in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza. They say Israel’s checkpoints and separation barrier cut them off from their neighbours and holy places in Jerusalem.
Some 90 percent of Palestinian Christians live in a 20km stretch from Ramallah and East Jerusalem to Bethlehem — an area locked in a labyrinth of Jewish settlements, Israeli-only roads and a drab concrete walls.
Built mostly within occupied land and not on the “Green Line”, which was Israel’s de facto border before the 1967 Middle East War, the barrier inside the West Bank is deemed illegal by the UN’s International Court of Justice.
Reuters
