This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.The Barkan Industrial Park (Hebrew: איזור התעשיה ברקן, lit.

[5][6][2] It is reported that many highly polluting factories from Israel moved into settlement industrial zones like Barkan to profit from the relative lack of environmental regulations there.

[7] In 1998 Barkan factories generated an estimated 810,000 cubic meters of industrial wastewater, which flowed untreated from the three storage tanks, after a design defect made them nonoperational when overloaded, into a nearby wadi into the agricultural lands of the Palestinian villages of Sarta, Kafr ad-Dik and Bruqin, and reportedly polluting the groundwater with heavy metals.

[9][10] Founded in 1982, in order to strengthen the Jewish presence in the West Bank,[11] the industrial park currently includes about 120 businesses and factories manufacturing plastics, metal-work, food, textiles, and more, with a workforce of 20,000, half of whom are Palestinians.

[3] According to Suleiman Shamlawi, from the nearby village of Haris, large parts of the Barkan industrial plant are built over 215 dunams (22 hectares) of land belonging to his family, which the IDF confiscated in 1981 on the grounds it was not registered as private property in 1967.

[2] The Israeli government subsidizes companies setting up in West Bank industrial zones, where the rent and tax rates are much lower than in Israel.

[12] Former Samaria Regional Council head Gershon Mesika said - It's amazing how the radical Left fails to understand that the main victims are the Palestinians themselves ... Fortunately, so far these boycotts have been nothing but PR maneuvers, and we are sure that Jews and Arabs will continue to work together and strengthen our prosperous industry and live in coexistence[4]Human Rights Watch says that such "rosey sentiments ignore the deeply discriminatory environment in which settlement businesses operate, and Palestinian workers' vulnerability to abuse."

[11] Mohammed Mustafa, the Palestinian deputy prime minister for economic affairs, has labelled such industrial parks a form of "business colonization".

[19][20] In October 2008, following the Dutch lead, the Swedish company Assa Abloy, responding in turn to appeals from the Church of Sweden[19] and other groups, announced that it would move its production plant belonging to their Israeli subsidiary Mul-T-Lock from Barkan, and relocate inside Israel.