Palestinian Authority official Ghassan Daghlas said on Friday that the military has officially informed residents in the area of its intention to uproot all trees planted on both sides of the road.

The military stated that the decision was motivated by security considerations “to ensure protection” of Israeli settlers in the area.

Daghlas said thousands of olive trees would be cut and uprooted.

On April 28, Israeli settlers uprooted more than 150 olive trees in the village of Huwwara, south of Nablus.

In a similar move a day earlier, the Israeli settlers destroyed over 60 trees.

In January, Tadamun Foundation for Human Rights, an NGO, said in an annual report that an estimated 8,000 trees, some of them hundreds of years old, had been damaged and destroyed altogether by the Israelis.

“Settlers’ attacks include uprooting, burning and cutting down olive trees… Olive groves were also flooded by wastewater from the settlements,” said the rights group.

“We have been unable to count the hundreds of trees damaged in groves close to settlements due to Israeli security measures.”

Villagers living south of Nablus have said that Israeli settlers used chemicals in several cases last June to burn 1,500 trees there. In the blaze that followed, nearly 50 acres of prime agricultural land was also destroyed.

The Israeli regime has uprooted more than 800,000 olive trees in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967.

NTJ/MB