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West
Bank wall: State-sponsored land grab |
Posted By Karima
Saifullah
To Palestinians, the West Bank’s
barrier is just a wall of isolation.
It has been frequently slammed by
different parties, but the latest
criticism was from Amnesty
International, which accused Israel of
“widespread human rights abuses”.
The Amnesty report, released as the
Middle East marked the 40th
anniversary of the 1967 Six Day War,
broke no new ground but warned that
continued construction of the barrier
risks prolonging the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel was never concerned with the
2004 International Court of
Justice’s ruling that the so-called
security wall is illegal as it runs
through occupied territory. Instead of
removing the illegal barrier, Israeli
officials alleged that it could be
dismantled under a future peace
agreement.
But Amnesty said Palestinian homes are
being demolished and Israeli
settlements, also ruled illegal by the
International Court of Justice, are
being sanctioned as fences and walls
are diverted around them. The rights
group added that the barrier has been
deliberately built to seize
Palestinian territories amounting to
10 percent of the occupied West Bank
in what it described as a
state-sponsored land grab.
"Israel's ... security concerns
are no excuse for blatant violations
of international law, nor the
mistreatment of thousands of
Palestinians in a massive program of
collective punishment,” said Kate
Allen, Amnesty’s British Director.
The building of the separation wall
started 40 years ago, when Israel
claimed that it was simply occupying a
free land and started building the
barrier along the West Bank, isolating
hundreds of thousands of Arabs. The
barrier, mostly razor wire-tipped
fences and shorter sections of
concrete walls, already stretches for
220 miles and is planned to cover 450
miles when finished.
According to the Amnesty report,
titled "Enduring Occupation --
Palestinians under siege in the West
Bank", the wall, if completed as
planned, would surround twelve West
Bank villages housing 31,400 people,
more than half of them Palestinians
living within half a kilometer of it.
Even though the Israeli military
claims that its soldiers are ordered
to automatically assist any
humanitarian case, Amnesty slammed
Israel's policy of mobile checkpoints
which it said directly cause deaths by
imposing unjustified delays on
Palestinians trying to get to
hospital.
The checkpoints and roadblocks across
the area are considered constraints
for the movement of Palestinians and
directly affect their economy. Most of
the Palestinians residing in the area
are currently dependent on aid with
less quantity of low quality necessity
food. Rights groups are concerned that
the separation wall would only push
the Palestinian community towards
collapsing. The Amnesty report said
that Israel is “exacerbating the
increasingly fragile conditions in
which Palestinians live and work,
resulting in levels of despair,
poverty and food insecurity never seen
before in the territories”.
“International action is urgently
needed to address the widespread human
rights abuses being committed under
the occupation, and which are fuelling
resentment and despair among a
predominantly young Palestinian
populations,” said Amnesty’s
Middle East Director, Malcolm Smart.
The international human rights group
urged the Israelis to halt the
building of the wall and remove the
built parts gradually in order to stop
demolishing the homes of the
Palestinians. The report also asked
for a deployment of an
“international human rights
monitoring mechanism” to manage the
current situation.”
“This must be backed up with a
commitment to investigate, prosecute,
through the exercise of universal
jurisdiction, those who commit war
crimes or other crimes under the
international law”, Amnesty said.
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