Israel and the Occupied Territories: An ongoing human rights crisis
 |
|
Children play in the rubble of what were once their homes following an Israeli military incursion into the north Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, November 2006 © AI |
1 | 2
Since June, when the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) violently wrested control of security installations and other institutions in the Gaza Strip formerly in the hands of Palestinian Authority (PA) President’s Fatah party, there has been a flurry of international initiatives purportedly aimed at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ending Israel’s 40-year occupation of the Palestinian Territories.
Major international donors, notably the US and the EU, have resumed financial aid to the emergency PA government appointed by PA President Abbas in the West Bank, which they had cut after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. At the same time, international sanctions have been tightened against Hamas, which now de facto administers the Gaza Strip. The result has been a further deterioration of the humanitarian situation for the 1.5 millions Palestinians who live there.
The US President announced that the US will convene an international conference later this year to revive the long-stalled Middle East peace process. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was appointed as the new envoy of the Quartet (composed of the UN, US, EU and Russia), and tasked with helping revive the Palestinian economy, which has been virtually paralyzed by Israeli blockades on the movement of people and goods in the ccupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his intention to allow the PA to establish a Palestinian state in the OPT.
|
However, developments on the ground in the OPT are in stark contrast to the optimism of these pronouncements…
In the West Bank Palestinian homes are often demolished by the Israeli army, while Israeli settlements continued to be expanded in violation of international law - which prohibits Israel, as the occupying power, from transferring its citizens to the territory it occupies.
Some 8,000 Israeli settlers were removed from the Gaza Strip in 2005, but more than 450,000 Israeli settlers remain in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the number continues to increase at a rate of some 20,000 a year. To secure the presence and developments of Israeli settlements and the network of settlers’ roads, more than 500 Israeli military checkpoints and blockades restrict the movement of Palestinians between towns and villages in the West Bank - making the most basic activities of daily life difficult or impossible and strangling the Palestinian economy.
The 700km fence/wall which Israel claims aims to block the entry of Palestinian suicide bombers into Israel, is located mostly (80%) inside the West Bank – not between it and Israel. It cuts Palestinians off large areas of their most fertile and water-rich agricultural land, depriving them of a crucial source of livelihood and impeding their access to work, medical and educational facilities. The fence/wall, condemned as unlawful by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is routed so as to appropriate vast sway of land around some 50 Israeli settlements to allow for their future expansion.
In the Gaza Strip the blockade imposed since early June this year has caused a worsening of the already dire humanitarian situation. Nobody can leave, except the most urgent medical cases, and even the passage of basic foodstuff and humanitarian aid into Gaza has been significantly reduced. The blockade on import and exports has resulted in a decrease of up to 80 percent of production, and in some cases closure, in Gaza’s factories – a disastrous development for the 1.5 million inhabitants, most of whom are unemployed, living below the poverty line and forced to depend on international aid for survival.
Israeli air strikes, artillery and shooting attacks, including into refugee camps and densely populated residential area, have destroyed much of Gaza’s infrastructure and have killed hundreds of Palestinians since last year. In the same period an increase in home-made “qassam” rockets launched from Gaza by Palestinian armed groups have killed four Israeli civilians, damaged homes, schools and other properties.
