Middle East trip: Alabali Radovan condemns settlers against Palestinians

Federal Development Minister Reem Alabali Radovan (SPD) visited a quarter in East Jerusalem at the beginning of her Middle East trip, the Arab residents of which feel harassed by Israeli settlers. According to the Ministry of Development, Palestinian families, a district in the Silwan district, are hardly received in renovating or expanding their houses. According to residents, 33 houses have been demolished here by the city administration since October 2023.

The Federal Government always emphasizes that the settler power is contrary to international law, said the minister. Germany still stands for the two -state solution.

Specialist Abu Dijab, who shows her a house destroyed in 2024, in which he had lived with his family for decades, gives the guest from Germany a message: “The fact that Israel is not being held accountable has led to my house and the houses of other families being torn down.” It is not only about his family and around his quarter, but also about the fate of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank.

On her three-day journey, the SPD politician wants to meet representatives of the Palestinian autonomy authority in the West Bank and speak to relatives of Israeli hostages, who had been dragged into the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023 in the terrorist attack of Islamist Hamas.

Alabali Radovan has never been in Israel or the Palestinian areas. Her ministry has accompanied many development projects in the Gaza Strip in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in the past decades. Some of the facilities that Germany once financed in the Gaza Strip are now in rubble and ash. In the West Bank, too, it is difficult to successfully implement projects due to the unstable location and the restricted mobility.

An employment initiative, which was agreed by the former development minister, Svenja Schulze (SPD), in April 2024 with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, should be given around 25,000 new jobs in West Bank and in East Jerusalem within three years. So far, according to the ministry, there are only a few hundred jobs, and 3,000 people should find work by the end of the year.