By Abdel Rauf Arnaut

JERUSALEM (AA): The Israeli government hopes to settle some 250,000 Israelis in the occupied Syrian Golan heights over the next 30 years, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) reported on Monday.

The report comes one week after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a presidential proclamation recognizing the Golan Heights as “Israeli territory”.

According to the IBA, the Israeli plan also includes construction of two new Jewish-only settlements in the Golan, along with thousands of new settlement units and a raft of planned transport and tourism projects in the region.

The population of the Golan Heights currently stands at some 50,000, including 22,000 illegal Israeli settlers, according to Israeli figures.

Prior to the Israeli occupation in 1967, the Syrian population of the Syrian Golan was approx. 140,000. Almost all of them were forcibly transferred or displaced from their homes during and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, forced to relocate to refugee camps around Damascus and whose numbers today are approaching half a million. Following Israel’s conquest, one city and 344 villages and farms were destroyed. Only six villages with a total population of 7,000 remained (one of which was later destroyed).

Israeli began to establish settlements in the Occupied Syrian Golan within a month of the 1967 war. Today, there are approximately 23,000 settlers, living in over 34 illegal settlements, profiting from the Occupied Syrian Golan’s abundant natural resources.

Israel had long pushed Washington to recognize its claim over the strategic plateau, which it seized from Syria during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, but previous U.S. administrations had refrained from doing so.

Additional report The Muslim News

[Israeli occupied Syrian Golan Heights Map. Public Domain because it contains materials that originally came from the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook]