Ghassan Qabha, mayor of the town of Barta'a, told the official Palestinian Wafa news agency that Israeli forces on Sunday evening placed several prefabricated homes in a mountainous area near a checkpoint behind the separation wall southwest of Jenin.
He added that the prefabs have been put in the area as part of the Zionist regime’s plan to establish a new settler outpost there.
About 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds.
Palestinians want the West Bank as part of a future independent Palestinian state, with East al-Quds as its capital.
The last round of Israeli-Palestinian talks collapsed in 2014. Among the major sticking points in those negotiations was Israel’s continued settlement expansion on Palestinian territories.
All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law as they are built on occupied land.
The UN Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in the occupied territories in several resolutions.
Area C, which is under full Israeli control, makes up more than 60 percent of the entire occupied West Bank. Eighty-eight percent of the area lies in the strategic Jordan Valley, which comprises a third of the West Bank.
Since 1967, the Zionist regime has been enforcing the draconian policy of demolishing the houses of Palestinians it deems to be behind fatal attacks against Israeli settlers. The practice, however, was temporarily halted from 2005 to 2014, with the exception of 2009, when scores of homes were sealed and razed in East al-Quds.