occupied Jerusalem, since the beginning of this year, including murders, destruction of public and private property, arrests, threats, and other crimes and violations.
Israeli violations in the West Bank
According to the US Department of State, the UN General Assembly, and international human rights organizations, there have been credible reports of human rights violations committed by Israel against Palestinians, some of which amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Reports of human rights violations against Palestinians by Israel include reports of unlawful or arbitrary killings, arbitrary or unjustified detention (of both Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories), restrictions on Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, including arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, family and home, significant interference with freedom of peaceful assembly and association, sometimes restricted access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, punishment of family members for alleged crimes by a relative, restrictions on freedom of expression and the media including censorship, routine and unlawful harassment of NGOs, unlawful practice or intimidation and threats of violence against Palestinians, targeted killings of Palestinians, and labor rights violations against Palestinian workers. In addition, human rights organizations have described the State of Israel as an apartheid regime.
The Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip has been described as a form of collective punishment and a serious violation of international humanitarian law. Israeli military campaigns in the Gaza Strip include Operation Cast Lead, which the UN Fact-Finding Mission described as “a deliberate disproportionate attack aimed at punishing, humiliating and terrorizing the civilian population, radically reducing the local economy’s ability to function and provide services, and imposing on it a growing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
Israel has also long been accused of illegally harvesting organs from Palestinians. The first evidence of illegal organ harvesting dates back to the early 1990s. Israel admitted that Israeli pathologists had taken organs from dead Palestinians without the consent of their families, and the first Israeli heart transplant was actually a stolen organ from a Palestinian. Some Israeli doctors have spoken out against illegal organ harvesting from Palestinians without family consent.
Fragmentation of land and control of Palestinians
West Bank closure
In 1920, Israel Zangwill argued that the creation of a state free of non-Jews would require a kind of “racial redistribution” in South Africa. In 1931, Arnold Toynbee predicted that, given the nature of the Zionist project of securing land for Jewish use only and excluding Palestinian labor, the British Mandate government would eventually have to compensate for the process by legislating to create a reserve for the Palestinians. He compared this to the situation in South Africa under the Natives Land Act of 1913, which established the principle of apartheid. These separate territorial reserves were the forerunners of the Bantustans, a word that only gained currency in the 1940s. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, its first president, Chaim Weizmann, and South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts supported each other’s views on the racist basis of their states and their rights to indigenous lands.
Planning for segmentation
The official “Master Plan for the Development of Samaria and Judea to the Year 2010” (1983) envisioned the creation of a belt of concentrated Jewish settlements linked to each other and to Israel beyond the Green Line while disrupting the same links that connected Palestinian towns and villages along the north-south highway, thus blocking any parallel strip development of Arabs and leaving the West Bank population dispersed, unable to build a larger urban infrastructure, and out of sight of Israeli settlements. This was dubbed “Operation Siege,” and is most clearly demonstrated by the encirclement of Qalqilya by a concrete wall, or what Ariel Sharon called the Bantustan model, in reference to the apartheid system, which many argue makes Israeli occupation policies no different from the South African model. In particular, it can be compared to the policies applied in South Africa in the Transkei, a policy that may have a broader geopolitical scope, if the Yinon Plan is to be taken as an indicator of Israeli policy. The World Bank said in 2009 that creating economic islands in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was a development dead end and would only jeopardize the building of a viable, economically unified Palestinian state.
One notable function of the separation wall is to seize large areas of land believed to be important for future settlement projects, especially in the case of the Susya area, which absorbs land worked by Bedouin shepherds with proven Ottoman ownership of the terrain. The construction, largely inspired by Arnon Sofer’s ideas of “preserving Israel as an island of alienation in a crazy region,” had the general justification of defending Israel from terrorist attacks, but was also designed to annex a large area of the West Bank, most of it private Palestinian land: 73% of the area designated for annexation to Israel was arable, fertile and rich in water, and had previously constituted the “breadbasket of Palestine.”
Had the wall been built along the Green Line for the same purpose, it would have extended 313 kilometers instead of 790 kilometers, and would have cost far less than the $3.587 billion estimated for the extended wall (2009). This disparity stems from the government’s decision to connect dozens of settlements west of the wall. The project’s incompleteness is said to be due to pressure from settler lobbyists opposed to completion that would restrict further settlement expansion or isolate them from Israel, as is the case with Gush Etzion. There are only 12 gates through the 168 kilometers of wall surrounding East Jerusalem, four of which theoretically allow access to West Bank residents who can obtain a permit. An entire generation of West Bank residents have never seen the Temple Mount, a denial of international law that provides for the right of access to places of worship.
Legal system
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is characterized by legal asymmetry, which embodies a fragmented jurisdiction across the West Bank, where ethnicity determines the legal system under which a person will be tried. According to Michael Sfard and others, the complex military system of laws imposed on Palestinians has enabled violence rather than limited it. Until 1967, people in the West Bank lived under a unified system of laws enforced by a single judicial system. State law (qanun) is a relatively foreign concept in Palestinian culture, where a combination of sharia and customary law (‘urf) forms the natural frame of reference for relations within the basic social unit of the family clan (hamula). Settlers are subject to Israeli civil law, while Palestinians are subject to the military law of the occupation arm. In general, the Israeli system has been described as one in which “the law, far from limiting the power of the state, is merely another means of exercising it.” A Jewish settler can be detained for up to 15 days, and a Palestinian can be held without charge for 160 days.
Under the legal framework of international law, the occupied local population should remain bound by its own criminal laws and be tried in its own courts. However, under security provisions, the occupying power can suspend local laws and replace them with military orders enforced by military courts. In 1988, Israel amended its security law so that international law could no longer be invoked before military judges in its courts. The Supreme Court has upheld only one appeal against more than 1,000 arbitrary military orders imposed from 1967 to 1990, which are legally binding in the occupied territories. Israeli companies in the West Bank that employ Palestinian labor have set their labor laws in accordance with Jordanian law. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that this order was discriminatory and that Israeli law should apply in this area, but as of 2016, according to Human Rights Watch, the ruling had yet to be implemented, and the government has stated that it cannot comply.
freedom of movement
It has been said that “for Jewish settlers, the roads are connected, for Palestinians, they are separate.” Between 1994 and 1997, Israeli forces built 180 miles of bypass roads in the territories, on land seized because they were close to Palestinian villages. The specific purpose was said to be to provide protection for settlers from Palestinian sniping, shelling and shooting from vehicles. Permanent and flying checkpoints (some 327 per month in 2017), barriers and restrictive networks restructure the West Bank, but they also constrain the normal daily lives of Palestinians. They form an apartheid network of “octopus arms that control Palestinian population centers,” says Elisha Efrat, a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University. A myriad of fences, concrete slabs, manned checkpoints, mounds, trenches, iron gates and walls impede movement on main and secondary roads. The result has been the division and fragmentation of Palestinian towns, creating endless obstacles for Palestinians to get to work, school, markets and relatives. Women have died or miscarried while waiting at checkpoints for permission to go to hospital. The World Bank estimates that the impact of restrictions on workers’ movement costs some $229 million annually (2007), while the additional costs from the circuitous roads people must drive totaled $185 million in 2013. In one village, Kafr Qaddum, soldiers from the Nahal Brigade planted explosive devices on a plot of land where demonstrators were gathering, as a “deterrent” measure: they were removed when a 7-year-old boy was injured.
In February 2022, Israel issued a 97-page decree to be implemented by July 5. The document replaces a previous four-page guideline regulating entry into and exit from the Palestinian territories. Strict restrictions are imposed on foreigners, students, businesspeople, academics, and, in general, dual-national Palestinians visiting their families there. The tightening of the restrictions is expected to have significant negative repercussions on the local Palestinian economy.
Closure of cities and villages
The closure policy (Hebrew: Seger) operates on the basis of the passage system enacted in 1991, and is divided into two types: a general closure that restricts the movement of goods and people, except in the case of a permit, to and from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, which developed in response to a series of stabbing attacks in 1993, and the implementation of a comprehensive closure of both areas. Apart from the general closures, a complete closure was imposed for more than 300 days starting in September 1993 after the declaration of the principles of the Oslo I Accords and in late June 1996. The most stringent comprehensive closure was implemented in the spring of 1996 following a series of suicide bombings carried out by the Hamas movement based in the Gaza Strip in response to the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, when the Israeli government imposed a two-week ban on all movement of more than 2 million Palestinians in 465 towns and villages in the West Bank, a measure repeated after clashes that erupted during archaeological excavations under the Western Wall of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Israeli military has installed iron gates at the entrances to the vast majority of Palestinian villages, allowing the military to close them at will, within minutes. Notable examples of villages that have been subject to long-term isolation, with residents suffering severe restrictions on movement, are Nu’man, whose residents are classified as West Bank residents, and Kafr Qaddum, which was annexed to the Jerusalem municipality and has had a permanent roadblock at its entrance for 14 years, starting in 2003, the same time as the Kedumim settlement, and since 2011 its residents have been protesting the roadblock, which requires them to travel six times farther than the usual route to reach Nablus.
As the Gulf War in Kuwait drew to a close, Israel again imposed a seven-week curfew on the West Bank (and Gaza), causing devastating economic setbacks, with thousands of Palestinians thrown out of their jobs in Israel. Nablus was under a full curfew for 200 days over two years (2002-2004). During house raids, windows and doors were smashed, food stocks were reduced to an indistinct mush, and grain stores, televisions, solar panels, water tanks, and radios were destroyed or confiscated.
It is common for Israeli authorities to impose a comprehensive closure on the West Bank during Jewish holidays, such as Yom Kippur, Passover, Sukkot, and Rosh Hashanah, with the exception of the Jewish industrial areas in the area. The reasons given are to prevent terrorist attacks, as well as to enable security personnel at checkpoints to enjoy these holidays. These closures can sometimes last for 11 days.
Marriage difficulties
In dealing with the Palestinian right of return while negotiating for UN recognition in 1948, Israel came up with a family reunification program, and granted membership on the basis that it would abide by international law in this regard. The word “return” was banned from Palestinian newspapers as it posed an existential threat to Israel. In practice, Israel assesses proposed family reunifications in terms of the perceived demographic or security threat. This program was frozen in 2002. Families consisting of a Jerusalemite husband and a Palestinian from the West Bank (or Gaza) face enormous legal difficulties in trying to live together, with most applications going through a complex process that takes an average of a decade and consists of four stages. Women with “foreign husbands” (those without Palestinian ID cards) are reportedly never allowed to join their husbands. The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law of 2003, which was later renewed in 2016, imposed a ban on family unification between Israeli citizens or “permanent residents” and their spouses who are originally from the West Bank or Gaza. However, this requirement does not apply to Israeli settlers in the West Bank or Gaza (until 2005). In such cases, the ban can be interpreted in terms of “security concerns.”
A Palestinian Jerusalemite who joins his wife in the West Bank and thus fails to maintain residency for seven consecutive years in East Jerusalem can have his residency status revoked. According to B’Tselem, none of the more than 2,000 Palestinians registered as absentee property owners in the West Bank are allowed to return for purposes such as family unification because their return would force the Israeli authorities to return their property, which has allowed the establishment of settlements on the property of their original Palestinian owners.
targeted assassinations
Targeted assassinations are selective, lethal acts of violence carried out against specific individuals. Reports appeared in the press around September 1989 that Israel had compiled a list of wanted individuals, many of whom were subsequently killed, and there was speculation that Israel may have been operating “death squads.” Israel first publicly acknowledged using the tactic against Hussein Abayat in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, in November 2000. In its ruling on the practice, the Israeli Supreme Court in 2006 refrained from either endorsing or banning the tactic, but set four conditions—precaution, military necessity, follow-up investigation and proportionality—and stipulated that its legality must be determined on a case-by-case analysis of the circumstances. Nils Melzer found that the ruling was a step forward but flawed in several key respects, notably by failing to provide guidelines for determining when the practice would be permissible. According to one former official, cited by Daniel Byman, Israel spends an average of 10 hours planning a targeted killing and 10 seconds considering whether to go ahead with the assassination.
Of the 8,746 violent Palestinian deaths recorded between 1987 and 2008, 836 were executed after individuals were identified based on information gathered from “collaborating” spies. According to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, 114 civilians died between 2000 and the end of 2005 as a result of collateral damage when Israeli security forces assassinated 203 Palestinian militants. Figures from November 9, 2000, to June 1, 2007, show that Israeli assassinations killed 362 people, 237 of whom were directly targeted and 149 bystanders. One intelligence officer, recounting the atmosphere in the operations room where the assassinations were planned and then viewed on video, said that concerns about “collateral damage” were never mentioned, and the chants were of “successful targeting mission.”
Daily monitoring: Cameras are spread everywhere in the Old City of East Jerusalem and other cities.
The Israeli occupation, in its surveillance of Palestinians , has been called a surveillance state par excellence. The entire Palestinian population is kept under surveillance, regardless of intelligence concerns, using smartphones and closed-circuit cameras, some of which can see inside homes, whose images are then fed into the Israeli military’s “Blue Wolf” tracking system, equipped with facial recognition technology. It is a shortened version of the Wolf Pack, a computer database containing “personal files on nearly every Palestinian in the West Bank, including photographs of individuals, their family history, education, and security assessments.” The deployment of such systems is prohibited in Israel. IDF soldiers on duty at a checkpoint in the West Bank are not allowed to end their shifts until they have filled out their quota of 50 photos of Palestinians passing through the checkpoint and their details. Settlers have a parallel smartphone app, White Wolf, to scan information on Palestinians. Drones, military balloons, and the invasive Pegasus spyware that hacks smartphones are also part of the West Bank surveillance system.
Among many Israeli critics of the occupation, activist Jeff Halper and philosopher Avichai Margalit have expressed concern about the paralyzing effect of sophisticated surveillance systems on Palestinians, and the “matrix of control” underlying the occupation. Shortly after hostilities ceased, Israel began counting every item in homes, from televisions to refrigerators, stoves to livestock, orchards to tractors. It checked and addressed letters, and inventoried workshops that produced furniture, soap, textiles, sweets, and even eating habits. While many innovations were introduced to improve workers’ productivity, they can also be seen as mechanisms of surveillance. Israeli military planners anticipate the day when Israel will withdraw from parts of the West Bank: this will not end the occupation, because after that they envision an “invisible occupation”/“airborne occupation” or a “disappearing occupation” system with the ability to control the vacated territories effectively through surveillance and strikes.
A former Israeli intelligence officer involved in Unit 8200 likened the surveillance system to that in the German film The Lives of Others, with the difference, in his view, that Israeli surveillance was more efficient. He stated that while the Israeli public believes this surveillance is focused on counterterrorism, much of the intelligence gathering is actually aimed at innocent people. He claimed that no Palestinian is exempt from constant surveillance. Any information that allows for “blackmail,” such as evidence of marital infidelity, health problems requiring treatment in Israel or sexual orientation, is considered relevant. Israeli surveillance and bombing of Palestinian areas is continuous and intense, with former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter noting that “when a Palestinian child draws a picture of the sky, he doesn’t draw it without a helicopter.”
Control techniques
Ben Enrich, citing Gudrun Kramer’s account of the British military suppression of the 1936 Palestinian revolt, notes that, apart from caning, all the extreme measures adopted by the Mandate authorities are repeated as standard practice in the way Israel administers the occupied territories.
Scholars differ on how to classify the control techniques around separation and exclusion used to reinforce Israeli control over the West Bank. Jan Selby argues that there are five main axes that reinforce territorial colonization:
Gershon Shafir discovered a matrix of five techniques of Israeli domination over the Palestinians:
Richard Falk adds political assassinations, extrajudicial executions, and the use of collective punishment to the list. According to Neve Gordon, Israel uses lawfare “to code the human rights field and in this way [helped] frame human rights work in Israel as a security threat.”
Population transfer and deportation
Israel was a High Contracting Party to the Fourth Geneva Convention, which specifically deals with the protection of civilians in a war zone, and as a signatory, it included Article 49, which states : Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive… The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
This last clause is absolute, allowing no exceptions, and was ratified by Israel when it signed the Geneva Conventions on 6 July 1951. The sentence was written to prevent a repetition of the colonial practice established by some powers, by which Germany was supposed to be understood, of transferring its population to occupied territories for political and racial reasons in World War II. Moreover, Article 76 of that Convention excludes deportation as a punitive measure, stating: Protected persons accused of crimes shall be detained in the occupied state and, if convicted, shall serve their sentences there. The principle is clear and unambiguous – “The occupier may not expel any person, however much he may constitute a security danger.”
According to one estimate, between 1967 and 1978, Israel expelled some 1,151 individuals, including two entire tribes, and sent them into exile en masse from the Jordan Valley in December 1967 and May 1969. To provide a legal justification for these actions, which contravene the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel applied Law No. 112, which dates back to the Defence (Emergency) Regulations issued by the British Mandate government that preceded the Geneva Convention by four years. These in turn dated back to the emergency military legislation enacted to counter the Palestinian war of opposition to British occupation and Jewish immigration in 1936-39. The fathers were most affected in the early days: families were divided, and the practice involved arresting heads of households at night in their homes and taking them to the desert south of the Dead Sea where they were forced, at gunpoint or with gunfire, to cross into Jordan.
For at least two years, beginning in the mid-1970s, Israel rounded up Palestinians from Israeli prisons and forced them across the Jordanian border in the Negev desert. The practice, codenamed “Operation Patient,” resulted in the expulsion of at least 800 people. But the archives of the operation remain largely inaccessible to researchers.
To this day, any Palestinian Jerusalemite can have his residency revoked under Israeli law if Jerusalem, in the view of the Israeli authorities, has not been their “center of life” for seven consecutive years. The revocation constitutes forced residency, and has affected at least 19,595 Palestinians since 1967.
The forced displacement of Palestinians continues in the West Bank: In 2018, the Israeli Supreme Court gave the green light to evict the residents of Khan al-Ahmar from their village outside Abu Dis. In February 2017, Israel arrested Maan Abu Hafez, a 23-year-old Palestinian, at a checkpoint for not having an ID card, and detained him under a deportation order in a foreigners’ prison in the city of Ramle. He grew up in the Jenin refugee camp since he was three. Israel is seeking to deport him to Brazil, even though he does not speak Portuguese, his mother is from Uruguay, and his Palestinian father abandoned the family for Brazil in 1997 and has not been heard from since.
Control and supervision
In the West Bank, both the British Mandate’s “Defense Emergency Regulations of 1945, No. 88”—which stipulated that “every article, picture, advertisement, decree and death notice must be submitted to the military censor”—and the Israeli military’s “Order No. IOI (1967),” as amended by “Order No. 718 (1977)” and “No. 938 (1981)” regarding “Prohibition of Incitement and Negative Propaganda” form the basis for censorship of West Bank publications, poetry and books, as well as literary productions. The civil and military censorship offices can overrule each other’s decisions, making it more difficult to obtain publication permits. However, there are no clear guidelines, so even works translated from the Hebrew press, or theatrical performances permitted in Israel, such as Hamlet, can be subject to censorship. Criticism of the settlements was off-limits, as were feelings of national pride. Mourning eulogies for the dead, or expressions of pride in those who died, could be challenged. Even mentioning the word “Palestine” was forbidden. Under Israeli Military Order 101, Palestinians are prohibited under military law from demonstrating or publishing anything related to a “political issue.”
Newspapers can lose their licenses, without giving any reason, under the 1945 Emergency Regulations (Article 2/92). Travel permits can be denied to enable prominent Palestinians such as Elias Freij, the mayor of Bethlehem, to give interviews abroad. Graffiti (shahaati) protesting the occupation is banned unless approved by the army, and graffiti artists are held liable and fined for it, so the practice has had to be banned by Palestinians because it has become a major source of income for Israel. Recently, internet surveillance, using software to identify potential threats in social media posts, has led to the arrest of 800 Palestinians by Israeli units and Palestinian Authority security forces, with 400 of them arrested as “lone terrorists” for what they wrote, and according to security expert Ronen Bergman, no algorithm has been able to identify lone attackers.
Forced cooperation
One of the first things Israel seized when it occupied the West Bank was the archives of the Jordanian Security Police, whose information allowed it to turn informants in the area for this service into informants for Israel. The recruitment of collaborators – informants whose homes were raided under the pretext of interrogation and then planted in cells to persuade other prisoners to confess – began in 1979. The number of collaborators with Israel before the Oslo Accords was estimated at 30,000. According to Haaretz, the Shin Bet used a number of “dirty” methods to recruit Palestinians, including exploiting people identified as suffering from personal and economic difficulties, or people seeking family reunification, or a permit for medical treatment in Israel.
Tax collection
Under international law, no occupying power has the right to impose taxes in addition to those that existed before the occupation. By Military Order No. 31 of June 27, 1967, Israel took over the Jordanian tax system, with a notable change: Israelis moving to the settlements were exempt from taxes under Israeli law, while by 1988 the income tax rate was high at 55% for those earning in the 8,000 dinar bracket, and was reduced to apply to those earning 5,231 dinars. In Israel, the 48% tax bracket applies to those earning almost double that amount.
In 1988, the entrepreneurial Christian town of Beit Sahour, which had several hundred mostly family-run businesses, organized a tax boycott on the grounds that they were not seeing any benefits flowing from their taxes, basing their boycott on the American colonial revolution principle against their British masters, i.e. no taxation without representation. They refused to pay VAT and/or income taxes. 350 families, comprising 1,000 individuals, were targeted and their bank accounts frozen, and another 500 had their bank accounts confiscated or deducted. Israel responded with collective punishment, imposing a 42-day curfew on the town, raiding homes daily and confiscating commercial machinery and any equipment for commercial purposes, refrigerators, jewelry, money, household furniture and sometimes souvenirs. To protect soldiers from stone-throwing, cars were parked and positioned around homes, and people were mobilized to act as human shields. The value of the confiscated goods had nothing to do with the taxes imposed, and they were auctioned off in Israel at an estimated 20% of their replacement value. The effect was to virtually eliminate the productive base of Beit Sahour.
collective punishment
Israel’s use of collective punishment measures, such as restrictions on movement, the bombing of residential areas, mass arrests, and the destruction of public health infrastructure, violates Articles 33 and 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 33 reads in part: No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
Collective punishment of Palestinians can also be traced back to the British Mandate methods of suppressing the 1936-39 revolt, and was reintroduced and in effect since the early days of the occupation, and was condemned by Israel Shahak as early as 1936. 1974. This bad practice came to light in 1988, when Israeli forces, in response to the killing of a suspected collaborator in the village, closed off Qabatiya, arrested 400 of its 7,000 residents, bulldozed the homes of those suspected of involvement, cut off all telephone lines, and prohibited the import of any form of food into the village or the export of stone from its quarries to Jordan, cutting off all contact with the outside world for nearly five weeks (24 February – 3 April). In 2016, Amnesty International reported that various measures taken in the commercial and cultural heart of Hebron over 20 years of collective punishment had made life extremely difficult for Palestinians, with thousands of businesses and residents forcibly displaced, enabling Jewish settlers to seize more property.
House demolition
Israeli military forces arrive to demolish the Palestinian community of Khirbet Ein Karzliya on January 8, 2014, displacing all 10 adults and 15 minors; the military returns a month later to demolish the tents in which the residents had been living since the last demolition.
House demolitions are a form of collective punishment. Under the law of occupation, the destruction of property, except for reasons of absolute military necessity, is prohibited. The practice of demolishing Palestinian homes began within two days of the occupation of the area in the Old City of Jerusalem known as the Moroccan Quarter, adjacent to the Western Wall. From the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories until 2015, according to the International Center for Humanitarian Impact, Israel is estimated to have demolished 48,488 Palestinian structures, displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
Israel considers its practices to be directed against homes built without Israeli permits or as a form of deterrence against terrorism, as the extremist is thus forced to consider the impact of his actions on his family. Between September 2000 and the end of 2004, of the 4,100 homes demolished by the Israeli military, 628, home to 3,983 people, were demolished as punishment because a family member was involved in the Al-Aqsa insurrection. From 2006 to August 31, 2018, Israel demolished at least 1,360 Palestinian housing units in the West Bank (not including East Jerusalem), leaving 6,115 people – including at least 3,094 minors – homeless. 698 of them, housing 2,948 Palestinians, including 1,334 minors, were demolished in the Jordan Valley (January 2006 – September 2017). Even shepherds’ huts, on which taxes have been properly paid, can be demolished.
Permit system
Since 1967, almost every aspect of Palestinian daily life has been subject to pervasive military regulations, numbering 1,300 by 1996, from planting trees to importing books to expanding homes. Military Order 101 denied West Bank residents the right to purchase any form of printed matter—books, posters, photographs, even paintings—from abroad (including Israel) unless they obtained prior military permission. For the first two decades, Palestinians had to apply for permits and licenses for a myriad of things, including a driver’s license, a telephone, a trademark, a birth registration, and a certificate of good conduct to secure jobs in a variety of professions. Obtaining such permits has been described as a via dolorosa. But the precise criteria that must be met to obtain permits have not been made clear. It has been likened to an apartheid pass system. There are 42 types of permits, depending on the purpose of a person’s movements, required by Israeli authorities as of 2018.
Impact on education
The traditionally high priority given to education in Palestinian society continued into the early occupation, with Palestinians accounting for an estimated 10% of all Arab university graduates by 1979. Internal evidence from leaked reports in the 1960s suggests that improving higher education for Israeli Arabs was seen at the time as a potential security threat. Israel signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966, ratifying it in 1991. After 1967, Israel asserted that the right to education did not apply to the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, territories under occupation, because they lay outside Israel’s sovereign borders.
During the first intifada, Israel at one point imposed a 19-month closure on all schools in the West Bank, including kindergartens, suggesting that Israel deliberately aimed to disrupt the cognitive development of Palestinian youth. In the first two years of the al-Aqsa Intifada, the Israeli military fired on 100 schools, bombed some, and occupied others as military sites. In 2017, by one estimate, Israel issued either demolition or “stop work” orders to 55 schools in the West Bank.
Night raids
According to Major General Tal Russo, the IDF operates “all the time, every night, all over the place.” Israeli night raids typically take place between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. The units, often masked and accompanied by dogs, arrive in full combat gear and secure entry by knocking on or blowing up doors. Such missions have several different purposes: arresting suspects, conducting searches, mapping the interior of a residence, and photographing young men to improve their identification in future clashes. Laptops and cell phones are often confiscated, and when returned, they are not often damaged, but vandalism is common in the IDF, and looted items are given to needy or low-paid soldiers, as in Operation Defensive Shield. Reports of cash caches disappearing after searches are frequent. Many personal items – pictures of children or families, watches, medals, soccer trophies, books, Korans, jewelry – are taken and stored away, and according to one informant, intelligence officer trainees were allowed to take things from Palestinians “as booty from the warehouses.” Following international protests, in February 2014, a pilot scheme to issue summonses instead of arresting children at night began, and continued until December 2015. The purpose of the raid maps is said to be to determine what the area looks like from the Palestinians’ perspective. Future planning angles to enable the option of ambush operations from within those homes.
The practice of Israeli military units raiding, arresting and looting Palestinian homes in the dead of night is a long-standing practice that continues to this day. In just three days between 21 and 23 January 2018, Israel carried out 41, 24 and 32 separate raids. In 2006, Israel carried out 6,666 raids inside the occupied territories. In the first six months of 2007, 3,144 Israeli search/arrest raids were conducted in the West Bank. In 90% of the minors arrested, the families were given no explanation for the abduction or information about the length of time the child was held. In another study, 72.7% of the children surveyed witnessed night raids, a traumatic experience second only to watching mutilated or wounded bodies on television. Extrapolating from this figure, according to the NGO WCLAC, indicates that from the imposition of martial law in June 1967 until 2015, the Israeli military carried out more than 65,000 night raids on Palestinian homes in the West Bank (not including East Jerusalem).
Arrests and administrative detentions
Israel arrested an estimated 650,000 Palestinians between 1967 and 2005, one in three Palestinians in the first two decades alone; by 2023, the number had risen to one million. The military court system, the institutional linchpin of the occupation, treats Palestinians as “foreign civilians,” is presided over by Jewish Israeli judges, and is based on former British Mandate law, the application of which to Jewish activists has been strongly protested by Yishuv representatives. Four provisions provide for (a) prolonged incommunicado detention of suspects, (b) no access to a lawyer, (c) coercive interrogation to obtain evidence, and (d) the use of “secret evidence.” During this period, tens of thousands were subjected to administrative detention, the justification for which is to imprison suspects who, under conventional criminal law, might not be convicted. Tayseer al-Arouri, a mathematics professor at Birzeit University, was arrested at night on 21 April 1974, and was released on 18 January 1978, after spending 45 months in prison without trial or charge, only after Amnesty International issued a public protest.
One scholar in 1978 called the practice a “perversion of criminal justice” of a temporary nature. In 2017, Amnesty International noted that “hundreds of Palestinians, including children, civil society leaders and NGO workers, were regularly held in administrative detention,” and considered some, such as Khalida Jarrar and Ahmad Qatamesh, to be prisoners of conscience. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory described many of the convictions as resulting from “a range of violations of international law, including due process violations, that taint the legitimacy of the administration of justice by the occupying power.”
As of August 2023, 1,200 Palestinians were being held without charge or trial, in a practice known as “administrative detention.” Israel justifies the practice on security grounds. The administrative detention of at least 105 Palestinians was based on an Israeli law known as the “Unlawful Combatants Law,” which exempts detainees from prisoner-of-war status under Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention. Amid a wave of mass arrests and detentions during the 2023 war, the number of administrative detainees rose to 2,873 as of December 6, 2023, an all-time high, according to HaMoked, an Israeli NGO. Detention conditions have reportedly deteriorated dramatically since October 7, 2023, with numerous allegations of ill-treatment and torture by detainees, NGOs, and intergovernmental organizations.
Torture
States are obliged under the Fourth Geneva Convention to prevent torture, including mental suffering. According to Lisa Hajjar (2005) and Dr. Rachel Stroumsa, director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, torture has been a constant feature of Israeli methods of interrogating Palestinians. Torture can be of two types, physical and psychological. Reports of torture emerged in the 1970s, and began to be documented in detail by the NGO Al-Haq in the mid-1980s. The Landau Commission in 1987 examined some of the abuses and concluded that “moderate physical pressure” was acceptable. The Israeli Supreme Court subsequently banned the practice, except with authorization from the Attorney General on a case-by-case basis.
The slang term for the Hebrew military, tertur, is associated with policies introduced by Rafael Eitan, who ordered the army and border police to engage in frequent arrests and humiliation of large numbers of Palestinian residents. This refers to practices such as the mass raids that occurred whenever West Bank residents held nationalist demonstrations. The Israeli border police have witnessed residents being forced to sing the Israeli national anthem, slap each other in the face, and crawl and bark like dogs. The police also arrest thousands of Palestinians each year on “security” charges, ranging from outright terrorism to simply reading books on a blacklist.
Documented incidents of Israeli forces targeting and killing Palestinian children date back to the early days of the conflict. Following the 1948 war, and before the formal Israeli occupation of the West Bank, border skirmishes between Israelis and Palestinians occurred regularly, with numerous instances of Israeli soldiers shooting and killing unarmed civilians, including children. During the 1952 raid on Beit Jala, four children aged 6 to 14 were killed by machine gun fire. During the First Intifada, Palestinian children regularly sustained serious injuries, often fatally. The First Intifada saw exceptionally high participation by Palestinian teenagers, leading Israel to declare stone-throwing a felony under occupation law, a classification that applies to children as well as adults and allows for long-term imprisonment for minors. The ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized. According to a 2013 study by the United Nations Children’s Fund covering 10 years of allegations of child abuse in Israeli military practices in the West Bank, although international law requires that all children who come into contact with judicial systems be treated with dignity, and while children’s rights are respected at all times, evidence from several outside observers over a decade suggests that Palestinian children in Israeli military detention suffer cruel and degrading treatment. In law, the prohibition on such practices is “absolute and unconditional,” and even security considerations or the threat of war cannot override the rule.
Children make up half of the Palestinian population, and although they are often dismissed as “victims or misguided puppets,” they actively participate in the resistance, with some seeing it as a loss of their rights. According to James Graff, Palestinian children constitute a significant segment of the targeted Palestinian population, falling into categories from which they are normally exempted, and being singled out as a group vulnerable to traumatic violence, targeted in indiscriminate shootings, gassings, and violence by soldiers and state-sponsored settlers.
According to the Swedish branch of Save the Children, between 23,600 and 29,900 children required medical treatment after sustaining injuries as a result of IDF beatings during the first two years of the First Intifada, a third of them aged ten or younger. Under Yitzhak Rabin’s order of 19 January 1988 to use “force and beatings” and an interview in which he spoke of the need to “break their bones,” (Gordon 2008, p. 157) what had until then been a covert interrogation was made public in this way, until an uproar erupted when journalists filmed the tactic, a scandal to which he responded by issuing a ban on media entry into the territories in the spring of 1988.
Minors (age 16 and under) make up 5 percent of the child population, and account for 35-40 percent of the 130,000 Palestinians seriously injured by Israeli forces during the intifada. Of the 15-year-olds who required medical treatment, 35 percent were injured by Israeli gunfire, 50 percent by beatings, and 14.5 percent by tear gas. From 2009 to 2018, Israeli security forces shot and killed 93 Palestinian minors in clashes in the West Bank. During the Al-Aqsa Intifada, the death toll suggests that approximately 20-25 percent were children, with the difference that the Israeli fatalities were the result of physical explosions in which they were not the primary targets, while a significant proportion of Palestinian children were killed by Israeli sniper fire directed at individuals, according to Frank Afletto. Between September 2000 and December 2003, 109 children were killed by “single shots” to the head, four to the neck, and 56 to the heart and chest. Another 90 were killed by two or three gunshot wounds. In all, during the 3.25 years after the second intifada, 427 children were killed by IDF and settler gunfire.
Agriculture
Pastoralism was a major wing of the Palestinian economy. Of the 2,180 square kilometres (840 sq mi) of grazing land in the West Bank, Israel had permitted 225 square kilometres (87 sq mi) for such use in the early 21st century. In certain areas, such as the South Hebron Hills, Palestinian Bedouin herders’ pastures were often sprayed with poison pellets that killed their flocks and required careful capture and disposal to restore the land. A theoretical 326,400 dunams were open to Palestinian use, according to World Bank estimates, adding US$1.068 billion to Palestinian productive capacity. Another million could be used for grazing or afforestation, if Israel lifted its restrictions. The World Bank estimates that if Palestinian agriculture were given better access to water resources, it would benefit from an increase in agricultural production of about US$1 billion annually.
After 1967, restrictions were imposed on the types of fruit trees and vegetables that could be grown, and even the import of tractors required an Israeli permit. Immediately after the occupation, a pilot study of the groundwater-rich lands of Deir Dibwan concluded that it held promise as one of the best sites in the West Bank for growing oranges and bananas. An Israeli drilling permit was not possible, prompting most of the project participants to emigrate to the United States. Israel’s control over land, water, trade and markets, and its strict specifications and restrictions on what could be grown, are responsible for the decline of agriculture as a share of the West Bank’s GDP, and the decline in agricultural employment in the labor market from 46% to 27%, with production falling by 40.12% between 1993 and 1995. In the years immediately preceding the Al-Aqsa Intifada (1998–1999), Israeli forces and settlers uprooted 21,705 trees throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Between 2000 and 2009, the Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem estimated that Israel destroyed or uprooted 1,628,126 fruit trees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The destruction of agricultural goods was extensive during the Second Intifada. In the five months following the Intifada, 57,928 olive trees, 49,370 citrus trees, 22,270 fruit trees, 11,514 palm trees, 12,000 banana trees, and 30,282 grape trees were uprooted. As a result, olive oil production declined by 80% that year. In the 15-month period up to December 2001, the total number of trees damaged was estimated at 155,343 olive trees, 150,356 citrus trees, 54,223 almond trees, 12,505 palm trees, 39,227 grape trees, 18,400 banana trees, and 49,851 other types of trees. Between September 2000 and December 2002, Israeli forces destroyed 14,196 forest trees. In the first two years, taking into account the damage caused by Israel in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, according to Cheryl Rubenberg, 667,000 trees were uprooted and 3,669,000 square meters of agricultural land were destroyed. According to the Palestinian authorities, the restricted allocation of water to Palestinian agriculture has remained constant at 84 million cubic meters per year since 1967.
The olive tree, in addition to its economic function, is a symbol of the Palestinian nation and its quest for independence. 15% of the land – 45% of its arable land – is covered with olive groves, a major resource, and its bimonthly autumn harvest is a period of profound social and economic importance for families in most West Bank villages, for whom it provides about 40% (2009) of the West Bank’s agricultural production. It has relieved the unemployment resulting from the loss of jobs in Israel after the outbreak of the Second Intifada. The olive is colloquially known as the tree of the poor, and is considered a blessed tree, as it is mentioned in the Holy Quran in the verse: “By the fig and the olive” [At-Tin: 1], and the uprooting of olive trees by Israeli forces or settlers is a daily occurrence in the West Bank.
Following the Ottoman practice of uprooting olive trees to punish tax evasion, Israel began destroying the groves, but with the apparent aim of increasing security in the settlements and highlighting the internal road system in the West Bank that served the colonial infrastructure. The construction of the separation wall, built mainly on West Bank land, has uprooted tens of thousands of olive trees. In one village alone, Tulkarm, the route of the wall has uprooted 12,000 olive trees, while alienating residents from their groves and leaving another 100,000 trees on the Israeli side in the seam zone, which they can access only once a year. Regardless of state practices, settlers have waged what one scholar has called a “tree war” of stealing, uprooting, chopping down, or burning Palestinian olive groves, as part of a price tag approach. Of the 708,000 dunums of irrigable land in the West Bank, only 247,000 dunums are irrigated, and (2009) calculated that the total margin that the Palestinians are giving up is close to $480 million annually, or about 10% of GDP. The collateral impact of the loss of potential employment opportunities is close to (highest estimate) 10,000 jobs. The World Bank noted that only 35 percent of Palestinian land is irrigated or irrigated, costing the economy 110,000 jobs.
Water : Palestinian Water Policy and Israel’s Seizure of Palestinian Springs in the West Bank Following 1967, Israel revoked Palestinian water rights in the West Bank and, under Military Order 92 of August of that year, transferred all authority over water management to the military. Military Order 158 of November of that year required Palestinians to obtain a permit from the military authorities before constructing any new water facility. Until 1996, no Palestinian had received a permit to drill a well since then, at which time Israel was drawing a third of its fresh water and 50 percent of its drinking water from the West Bank. According to Human Rights Watch, Israel’s confiscation of water violates the Hague Convention of 1907, which prohibits an occupying power from confiscating the resources of occupied territory for its own benefit.
Palestinians have complained that their economy and agriculture have been severely affected by the depletion of village water to supply the settlements. Israel has imposed restrictive policies on West Bank residents. There is “blatant discrimination” in water pricing, allocation and delivery systems. Israeli settlers in the territories consume some eight to ten times more water than Palestinians. Water is sold to Israeli settlements at 0.5 Israeli New Shekels per cubic meter, while it is sold to Palestinian villages at 1.8 Israeli New Shekels per cubic meter. The former are supplied daily, while the latter are supplied only one or two days a week. According to John Cooley, Palestinian farmers’ wells in the West Bank were a key element behind Israel’s post-1967 strategy to preserve the area and protect “Jewish water supplies” that were considered “encroachment.”
By 2013, although some villages had only 15 liters per person, the Palestinian supply in the West Bank was estimated at an average of 70 liters per person per day, compared to 280-300 liters per Jewish settler. Sometimes the contrast is stark: in the village of al-Hadidiya in al-Baqia, the average per person is 20 liters, compared to 431 liters per settler per day in the nearby Jewish settlement of Ro’i, 431 liters of which is extracted from a well dug in al-Hadidiya’s land. Israeli settlements have also adopted a practice of seizing many springs belonging to Palestinian villages for their own use, and confiscating them to create adjacent parks suitable for tourism, which are off-limits to Palestinians.
Waste area
Israel ratified the international Basel Convention on December 14, 1994, under which any transfer of waste must be carried out with awareness of the risks to the Palestinian people, and prohibits the establishment of “environmental loss zones” in their midst. Israel is said to have used the West Bank as an “environmental loss zone” by placing 15 waste treatment plants there under less stringent rules than those required by the Israeli legal system, thus exposing the local population and the environment to hazardous materials. The military authorities do not publish details of these operations. These materials include sewage sludge, infectious medical waste, used oils, solvents, metals, electronic waste and batteries.
Israel built four Palestinian waste treatment plants in the 1970s, only one of which was operational in 2007, citing Israeli budgetary problems due to the lack of adequate infrastructure that left most Palestinian wastewater untreated. The landfill near Jiftlik in the Jericho Governorate, built on Palestinian property without planning or environmental impact analysis, is designated for the exclusive use of 1,000 tons per day of waste from Israeli settlements and cities inside Israel. Palestinians are limited to three landfills, and permits to build more are denied unless these sites can be used for settlement waste. Even if permits are granted without such an agreement, settlers’ waste is dumped there under military guard.
Resource extraction
Under the Hague Regulations (Article 55), an occupying power may extract some value from the resources of the occupied state but without depleting its assets: the right of use must benefit the occupied people. The Oslo Accords agreed to transfer mining rights to the Palestinian Authority. Israel granted concessions to operate 11 settler quarries. The World Bank estimates that 275 quarries could be opened in Area C, and that Israeli restrictions cost the Palestinian economy $241 million a year. Palestinians are denied permits to extract or process Dead Sea minerals, such as bromine, of which about 75 percent of the world’s production comes from the area, while Israeli companies such as Ahava do so and export to the European Union. The latest restrictions are estimated to cost the Palestinian economy $642 million.
Economic and social benefits and costs of occupation
Many Israeli companies operate in the West Bank, often run by settlers who enjoy the benefits of government subsidies, low rents, favorable tax rates, and access to cheap Palestinian labor. Human Rights Watch describes the “physical footprint,” with 20 Israeli industrial zones covering some 1,365 hectares by 2016, of these commercial, agricultural and other operations as being more extensive than the settlements themselves. Some Palestinian workers in the Barkan industrial zone complained anonymously that they were paid less than the Israeli minimum hourly wage ($5.75), with payments ranging from $1.50 to $2-4, with shifts of up to 12 hours, and no vacations, sick days, pay slips, or social benefits. Many of these companies export abroad, making the world complicit in the settlement enterprise.
Israeli policy aims to obstruct any form of Palestinian competition with Israeli economic interests. This approach was put forward by then-Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1986, when he said: “There will be no development by the Israeli government, and no permits will be granted for the expansion of agriculture or industry that might compete with the State of Israel.”
The World Bank estimated that the annual economic costs to the Palestinian economy of the Israeli occupation of Area C alone in 2015 amounted to 23% of GDP in direct costs and 12% in indirect costs, totaling 35%, plus fiscal loss of revenues. At $800 million, for a total estimated at $5.2 billion. In fiscal terms, one estimate puts the “leakage” of Palestinian revenues to the Israeli treasury at 17% of total Palestinian public revenues, or 3.6% of GDP. Annual Israeli government spending on settlements is estimated at $1.1 billion in 2015. By 1982, subsidies for Israeli agricultural production and the influx of Israeli manufactures had stifled the growth of manufacturing industries in the Palestinian territories. The high tariffs imposed by Israel on imports from countries outside Israel’s area meant that Palestinian consumers had the choice of paying high prices for goods imported from foreign countries, or buying them from high-cost Israeli suppliers. Palestinian goods exported to Israel were subject to customs duties, which earned Israel $1 million annually until 1991, but Israeli exports to the Palestinian territories were exempt from import duties. As domestic economic growth is hampered by Israeli restrictions, to compensate, 40% of the Palestinian economy relies on international aid, which is said to support the occupation itself, making it “one of the cheapest professions” for Israel. The Paris Protocol signed in 1994 allowed Israel to collect value-added tax on all Palestinian imports and goods from the country or transiting through its ports, with a clearance revenue system giving it effective control over approximately 75% of the Palestinian Authority’s income. Israel can withhold this revenue as a punitive measure, as it did in response to the Palestinian Authority’s decision to join the International Criminal Court in 2015.
A 2009 World Bank study concluded that “very few economies faced such a comprehensive set of obstacles to investment – not just physical barriers to movement, but also comprehensive institutional and administrative barriers to economies of scale and natural resources, coupled with unclear policy.”
Total economic costs
A joint study by the Palestinian Ministry of National Economy and researchers at the Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem indicated that by 2010, the costs of the occupation in 2010 alone amounted to 84.9% of Palestinian GDP ($6.897 billion). Their estimates for 2014 indicate that the total economic cost of the Israeli occupation amounted to 74.27% of Palestinian nominal GDP, or about $9.46 billion. The cost to the Israeli economy by 2007 was estimated at $50 billion.
Communications field : Communications in Palestine
Under the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed that the Palestinian territories had the right to build and operate an independent telecommunications network. In 2016, a World Bank analysis concluded that the terms of this agreement were not being implemented, with significant detrimental effects on Palestinian development. It took eight years for Israel to agree to a request for 3G frequencies, although they were limited, creating a bottleneck that left Israeli competitors with a clear market advantage. The competitiveness of the national mobile operator Ooredoo suffered from Israeli restrictions and delays, and illegal Israeli operators in the West Bank, which had 4G services available by that date, still maintain an unfair advantage over Palestinian companies. Israel imposes three other restrictions that hinder Palestinian competitiveness: restrictions on imports of equipment for telecommunications and ICT companies, movement to improve the development and maintenance of infrastructure, and finally, Palestinian international communications must pass through Israeli registries, for the purpose of monitoring. Between 2008 and 2016, progress in negotiating solutions to these problems was “very minimal.”
Tourism
The West Bank is a major draw for pilgrims and tourists, and has a rich heritage of great significance to the Abrahamic religions. After 1967, the loss of East Jerusalem cut off the potential gains to the West Bank economy from tourism. Ninety-two to ninety-four cents of every dollar of tourism trade goes to Israel, which exercises a virtual monopoly. Israel controls all access points to the major tourist attractions of East Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Jericho, and Palestinian hotels in much of the West Bank lie half empty.
Israeli barriers make it difficult for Palestinians to gain recreational access to the Dead Sea or develop tourism infrastructure around it. The World Bank estimates that $126 million a year and 2,900 jobs would be added to the local economy if Palestinians were allowed to operate on similar terms to Israeli entrepreneurs. Palestinians may be denied access to the Dead Sea beaches at checkpoints.
loss of cultural property
Israel’s Antiquities Law of 1978 allows for the expropriation of any site necessary for preservation, excavation or research. The military administration can confiscate Palestinian land on or near such sites, denying their owners building permits, and sometimes opening the areas to Israeli settlement. Under the 1954 Hague Convention, an occupying power may not remove material from the occupying state. In 2019, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that Israeli archaeological work in the West Bank could be kept off the public record. In 2019 alone, Israel issued 119 demolition orders in the West Bank, a 162% increase over previous years.
Many sites of cultural value were removed from Palestinian control, such as Jabal al-Fureidis, Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, the Bilal Mosque, the Tomb of Jesse and Ruth in Tel Rumeida, Hebron, Khirbet Qumran and the village of Shuqba, which contains a settlement waste dump. Many Palestinian heritage sites in the West Bank were added to the Jewish heritage list. In addition to the destruction of villages in Jerusalem and elsewhere, libraries with extensive historical resources on Palestine’s past were confiscated.
Illegal removal of Palestinian organs
Israel has long been accused of illegally harvesting organs from Palestinians, with the first evidence of illegal organ harvesting dating back to the early 1990s. Israel admitted that Israeli pathologists had taken organs from dead Palestinians without the consent of their families, and the first Israeli heart transplant was actually a stolen Palestinian organ. The former head of the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute, Yehuda Hiss, has stated that Israel kills Palestinians to harvest their organs.
sexual assault
: Sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict During the 2023 war, Palestinian women and girls were subjected to sexual violence. Palestinian women and girls were reportedly deliberately executed in Gaza, often with their children, by Israeli military forces, even when they were carrying white cloths. Palestinian women and girls were also subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment by the Israeli military, including being denied menstrual pads, food and medicine, severely beaten, raped, assaulted, threatened with rape and sexual violence, and subjected to various forms of torture and other forms of sexual assault. They were also stripped and searched by male Israeli military officers. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that Israeli forces photographed female detainees in “degrading conditions” and that the photographs were uploaded to the Internet.
On 19 February 2024, a group of UN special rapporteurs issued a report stating that “Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped and searched by male Israeli military officers. At least two Palestinian female detainees have been raped.”
The Special Rapporteurs also raised concerns about the disappearance of a number of Palestinian women and children, with reports of children being separated from their parents. In one case, a baby girl was reportedly forcibly taken from her parents to Israel. In response to the report, a US State Department spokesperson said: “Civilians and detainees must be treated humanely, and in accordance with international humanitarian law.” Physicians for Human Rights-Israel also described sexual humiliation of detainees, including sexual insults and urination on prisoners. The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club reported that men were subjected to severe sexual assault, including attempted rape and strip searches.
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