Mon 17 June 2019:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday inaugurated a new settlement in the occupied Golan Heights, in honor of his key ally U.S. President Donald Trump. Surrounding a large table, Israel’s cabinet met under a tent in the north of the Golan to name the settlement. The settlement will be known as “Ramat Trump,” or Trump Heights. Israel hopes the community, first built in the 1980s, will attract a wave of people to what is currently little more than an isolated outpost with just 10 residents.
The decision comes just two months after the U.S. president in late March recognized Israeli sovereignty over the part of the strategic plateau it seized from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day war. Israel later annexed the area in a move never recognized by the international community. “The Golan is Israeli and will remain so always,” Netanyahu declared. Trump is “a very great friend of Israel who has taken a decision that has never before been taken,” he added. Some 23,000 Druze — an Arab Muslim minority also present in Syria and Lebanon — live in the occupied and annexed portion of the Golan, while 25,000 Israeli settlers have arrived there since 1967.
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