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RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- Israeli bulldozers uprooted about 120 fruitful olive trees, on Sunday, in the al-Lubban al-Gharbi village, west of the central occupied West Bank district of Ramallah.

Fawwaz Salem, the former head of the village’s council, said that the uprooting of 120 trees came a month after Israeli forces delivered a military order to a local resident, Shafiq Abu Salem, informing him of confiscation of his private land near the al-Lubban al-Gharbi village, in order to pave a settler-only road in the area for the nearby illegal Israeli settlement of Beit Aryeh.

The 120 olive trees were planted across a plot of land of three dunams (0.74 acres).

According to Palestinians and rights groups, Israel’s main goal, both in its policies in Area C, in which more than 60% of Palestinian land is under full Israeli control, and Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise, is to depopulate the land of its Palestinian residents and to replace them with Jewish Israeli communities, in order to manipulate population demographics in all of historic Palestine.