GAZA CITY, March 16, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Israel is planning to build a new separation wall around the Gaza Strip just to grab more Palestinian territories, Palestinian experts warned on Wednesday, March 16.

“The wall will be built along the eastern and northern Gaza borders toward Beit Hanun and the southern borders toward Rafah,” professor Naem Baroud, the head of the Geography Department in the Gaza-based Islamic University, told IslamOnline.net.

The new Israeli wall will be established in parallel to the barbed wire Israel had built to divide the strip from the Palestinian land occupied in 1948 (what is now Israel).

The Palestinian expert warned that the new Israeli wall, besides gobbling vast swathes of land, will devastate farmlands and underground water resources.

Israel claimed that the new wall will be built to maintain security of the Israeli settlements adjacent to the strip.

The new wall will incorporate state-of-the art security measures such as surveillance cameras, electronic radars, warning and communications systems, and remote-controlled ambushes.

The construction of the new wall will be completed before the proposed Israeli withdrawal from Gaza scheduled to begin on July 20 this year.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” plan centers on dismantling all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip along with four other outposts in the West Bank.

Baroud said the new wall violates the 1949 Rodos agreement on drawing the armistice lines between Israel and the Arab countries.

Following their engagement in war in 1948, Arab countries and Israel held talks on the Greek Island of Rodos in 1949 to conclude a permanent truce.

“Israel violated the armistice lines and usurped pieces of land in the strip, especially in the areas of Absan, Bani Sohaila, Khuzaa and Al-Qarara,” Baroud said.

“The Palestinians are even barred from reaching the areas around the Israeli barbed wire, though the land is owned by Palestinians.”

Israel has set up the barbed wire around the Strip following the Oslo agreement in 1993 with the Palestinian Authority.

Kamal Al-Bughdadi, the head of the Bureij municipality, warned that the wall will increase the suffering of the Palestinian people.

“They (Israelis) want to build a new wall similar to the one they are building in the West Bank in order to make matters worse for the Palestinians,” he told IOL.

“Israel has already annexed Palestinian territories in the Bureij area when they built the barbed wire.”

Bughdadi also warned that there were no official Palestinian cadastral maps on the 1949 armistice lines to be used in defining the Gaza borders.

“The Palestinian Authority is to blame for that,” he said.

The first Palestinian atlas was launched Saturday, March 12, to document for the generations to come territories usurped and occupied by Israeli troops and keep the cause vivid.

Up to 50,000 maps charting Palestinian sites that date back to 1799 are found in the English-language geographical encyclopedia.

The 600-km-long barrier has resulted in the confiscation of 11,4000 donums (2,850 acres - 1,140 hectares) of privately-owned Palestinian land and in the destruction of 102,320 trees, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).

It will eventually snake some 900 kilometers along the West Bank and leave even larger swathes of its territory on the Israeli side.