issue no 121

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Issue No : 121 10th February , 2015

Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia | 1


Palestinian Cultural Organization MalaysiaMalaysiaM

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Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia

Israel to dismiss 3 officials who criticised Netanyahu

Palestinians protest Egypt court ruling against Al- Qassam

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P19

FEATURED STORY

Articles & Analyses

Read in This Issue

Killing by another means

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Hamas denies Meshaal visit to Iran

Love struggles to bridge Gaza and West Bank

151 Palestinian children in Israeli jails illegally

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P 9

P 6

Israel razes Palestinian structures in W. Bank

P16 Israel Insider

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CONTENTS

Palestinian Cultural

Organization Malaysia

Israel Insider

Articles & Analyses

News of Palestine

FEATURED STORY

Palestinians protest Egypt court ruling against Al- Qassam 4

Hamas denies Meshaal visit to Iran 5

Israel razes Palestinian structures in W. Bank 6

Israeli Navy Opens Fire on Palestinian Fishermen in Gaza 7

Egypt army fires on Palestinian sites 8

151 Palestinian children in Israeli jails illegally 9

Hamas lauds Turkish FM for Munich conf. boycott 10

Japan Funds Project to Rehabilitate Sanitary Facilities in Hebron Schools 11

Love struggles to bridge Gaza and West Bank 12

Turkey seeks to boost trade ties with Palestine 14

Rights group: 400 Palestinians detained by Israel in January 15

Israel to dismiss 3 officials who criticised Netanyahu 16

How Israel freezes Palestinian revenue 17

IOF arrests 9, summons 2 teens for interrogation 18

Killing by another means 19

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Featured Story

Palestinians protest Egypt court ruling against Al- Qassam

Thousands of Palestinians staged a protest in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah on Thursday against a recent Egyptian court decision, designating the military arm of Palestinian faction Hamas a “terrorist orga-nization.”The demonstrators gathered near Rafah Crossing on the border between Egypt and the blockaded Gaza Strip and chanted slogans against the Egyptian court decision.They also called for opening the border crossing, which has been closed down for most of the past one and a half year.On Saturday, an Egyptian court of urgent matters designated Ezzeddin al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, a “terrorist organization.”An Egyptian lawyer had earlier accused the Brigades of involvement in a recent series of coordinated at-tacks on military sites in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.“The decision of the Egyptian court was shocking for everybody in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said during the protest.“To the Egyptian judge who passed the ruling we say: you are mistaken,” he added.Relations between Egypt and Hamas – an ideological offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood – worsened soon after the Egyptian military ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader himself, in July of 2013.Egyptian media has since been accusing Hamas of being involved in a string of attacks that mostly targeted Egyptian military and police personnel in the restive Sinai Peninsula, which shares borders with Gaza.

06 February 2015 Source: MEMO

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An official spokesman for Hamas has denied that the movement’s leader, Khaled Meshaal, is due to visit Iran. Sami Abu-Zuhri made his comments in a statement to the Palestinian media.“Hamas’s relationship with Tehran is good,” said Abu-Zuhri, “but, currently, there are no arrangements for Me-shaal to travel to Iran.”He was responding to a claim by Dr Ahmed Yousef, a Palestinian politician and former aide of ex-Prime Minis-ter Ismail Haniyeh, that Meshaal would visit Tehran this month in order to repair the relationship between Hamas and the Iranian government.According to Yousef, there have been several meetings between Hamas officials and Iranians in order to pre-pare the ground for such visit. He claimed that Iran has promised to increase its support for Hamas in order to strengthen the Palestinian resistance to Israel’s military occupation.

07 Feb 2015 Source: MEMO

Hamas denies Meshaal visit to Iran

News of Palestine

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Israeli bulldozers on Monday razed several Palestinian buildings near the West Bank city of Nablus, an official has said.

“An Israeli army force backed by several bulldozers raided the West bank town of Kasra,” Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official in charge of Israeli settlements file in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, told The Anadolu Agency.

“They demolished two storage facilities used by farmers, a water well and a fence, under the pretext of having been built without permit in Area C,” Daghlas said.

He also noted that violent clashes erupted between Israeli troops and residents of Kasra where Pales-tinian youths hurled rocks at the Israeli troops, who used teargas and rubber bullets, leaving a number Palestinians with temporary asphyxia.

Israeli authorities could not be reached for a comment.

The U.S.-sponsored Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 1993 and 1995, divided the West Bank into areas A, B and C.

Israel typically prevents Palestinians in the West Bank’s “Area C” from erecting structures in the area on grounds that the land is under Israeli administration.

Area C, which constitutes nearly two thirds of the West Bank’s total territory, remains – in line with the terms of the accords – under full Israeli security and civilian control.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the city of Jerusalem in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the self-proclaimed Jewish state in a move never recognized by the international community.

02 February 2015 Source: World Bulletin

Israel razes Palestinian structures in W. Bank

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Israeli Navy Opens Fire on Palestinian Fishermen in Gaza

Israeli Navy Monday continued its almost day to day breach of the truce agreement reached on August 26, 2014, and opened fire toward Palestinian fishermen offshore Gaza, according to wit-

nesses.

One of the Fishermen informed WAFA correspondent in Gaza that Israeli naval gunboats opened its heavy machinegun-fire randomly at fishermen sailing within the six-nautical miles allowed fishing zone, causing financial damage to

one of the boats.

Despite of the use of heavy fire against unarmed fishermen in vul-nerable boats, no injuries were re-

ported.

Israeli Navy targets fishing boats almost on a daily basis in a clear breach of the Egyptian brokered truce agreement reached on Au-gust 26 of last year. This agree-ment includes allowing Palestinian fishermen to sail within six nautical

miles in the Gaza Sea.

The majority of Palestinians in Gaza depend on the fishing in-dustry as their primary source for living. However, being confined so close to shore led to poorer catch-es for fishermen in terms of fish

size, value and quantity.

“There are about 3,700 full-time fishermen in the Gaza Strip ready to serve a market of 1.7 million Palestinians. They used to export to Israel. Now Gaza imports about

80 of its needs from the Egyptians and the Israelis,” reported Re-

uters.

Mahmoud Al-Assi, 66, a fisher-man most of his life, said ‘Once we made enough to let us give away fish to the poor and needy people. These days we are beg-

ging for aid.”

The head of Gaza’s Fishermen Association Nizar Ayyash says that about 98% of Gaza fishermen

fall below the poverty line.

The Israeli-imposed fishing lim-it and the sewage water being poured into the sea means that Gaza’s fishermen are forced to fish in mostly polluted water, re-ported the United Nations’ Relief-

web website.

Reliefweb highlighted the case of 52 year-old Khalil Al-Habil, a Pal-estine refugee living in Gaza, who

has been a fisherman for all of his adult life. The Israeli blockade on the coastal enclave in recent years has made it extremely difficult for

him to support his family of 12.

“The water is not clear like it used to be decades ago. Even at cheap prices, people refrain from buying this unhealthy fish and many of us hardly manage to sell anything”,

Al-Habil added.

This had a detrimental effect on al-Habil’s ability to continue fish-ing, forcing him to sell his wife’s jewelry, and take loans from rela-tives and other sources to buy a

motorboat.

“It became a nightmare. I sank into pool of debts and am unable to

make ends meet,” al-Habil said.

2 Feb 2015 Source: World Bul-letin

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Egypt army fires on Palestinian sites

The Palestinian Interior Ministry said Tuesday that the Egyptian army had fired on two posts along the strip’s fraught border with Egypt – an assertion dismissed by an Egyp-tian military source.“The Egyptian army deliberately fired at two positions belonging to Gaza’s National Security apparatus near the strip’s border with Egypt,” Interior Ministry said in a state-ment.“The shooting came as a surprise, without any provocation from the Palestinian side,” it added.The ministry slammed the incident as a “dangerous precedent” and called for an inves-tigation.Earlier Tuesday, eyewitnesses said that a bomb had gone off near an Egyptian army patrol stationed near the Gaza border, prompting the patrol to fire on the Palestinian positions.An Egyptian military source, for his part, denied that shots had been fired at any Pal-estinian border posts, insisting that the Egyptian army “has never done this and never will.”“If we did, we would announce it and state our reasons for it – but that’s not the case here,” he said.The source went on to say it was not the first time for such accusations to be leveled against the Egyptian army by the Gaza authorities, describing the assertions as “unre-alistic.”

03 February 2015 Source: Agencies

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In a recently released report, the Military Court Watch said 47 percent of the children imprisoned in Israeli jails are currently being held in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which forbid the transfer of detainees outside of occupied Palestinian territories.The lawyers and family members of the children, who are being held as “security prisoners” in Israeli jails, have limited access to the prisoners.The Military Court Watch added that the Israel Prison Service does not provide accurate figures on the Palestinian prisoners.Earlier, an Israeli court sentenced Malak al-Khatib, a 14-year-old girl, to two months in jail for alleg-edly throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, a charge that Khatib’s parents have denied.On February 4, the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) said 11 Palestinian teenagers were de-tained when Israeli forces carried out a raid against their homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem (al-Quds).Earlier this month, the Palestinian Prisoners Club (PPC) said Tel Aviv had arrested 350 Palestinians in different cities across the West Bank during the month of January.More than 7,000 Palestinian prisoners are currently held in some 17 Israeli jails, dozens of whom are serving multiple life sentences. About 540 Palestinians are being held without trial under the so-called administrative detention.Administrative detention is a sort of imprisonment without trial or charge that allows Israel to incar-cerate Palestinians for up to six months. The detention order can be renewed for indefinite periods of time.

5 Feb 2015 Source: Press TV

151 Palestinian children in Israeli jails illegally

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The Palestinian faction Hamas on Saturday lauded a decision by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu not to attend the 51st Munich Security Conference due to Israeli participa-tion in a conference session on the Middle East.

“We applaud [Turkish] Foreign Minister Cavusoglu’s decision to pull out of the Munich Secu-rity Conference due to the participation of Israeli officials,” Hamas said in a statement.

“This move exemplifies Turkey’s role in standing by the Palestinian people and their plight,” it added.

On Friday, Cavusoglu decided not to attend the 51st Munich Security Conference, citing the participation of Israeli officials.

“We have decided not to participate in the Munich Security Conference because they [con-ference organizers] have subsequently invited Israeli representatives to the Middle East ses-sion,” Cavusoglu said at a press conference.

In 2014, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed “regret” for a 2010 deadly attack on a Turkish ship.

In 2010, the Israeli navy attacked the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in a Gaza-bound humani-tarian aid flotilla, killing ten Turkish activists.


Hamas lauds Turkish FM for Munich conf. boycott

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Japan Funds Project to Rehabilitate Sani-tary Facilities in Hebron Schools

The Japanese and Palestinian sides signed an aid agreement, estimated at $101,751, to rehabilitate sanitary facilities at three schools in Hebron.

The Japanese representative office in a press statement, said the project will be funded by the Government of Japan through its Grant Assistance for Grassroots Human Security Projects (GGP).

The funding will be used for rehabilitating sanitary facilities in two schools in Yatta and Halhoul towns, as well as for building a 100-cubic meters water well inside a girls’ school in Tarqomya area.

Japanese Ambassador for the Palestinian affairs, Junya Matsuura, affirmed his country’s continued support for the Palestinian people, stressing the importance of implementing economic, social and development projects needed by the Pal-estinian communities.

8 Jan 2015 Source: WAFA

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Love struggles to bridgeGaza and West Bank

He said he fell for “her ideas, her thoughts.” She said he made her forget she was over-weight, and “feel beautiful.”

They flirted awkwardly at a conference in Amman, Jor-dan, where they met in 2011. Then, in flurries of text mes-sages over a few weeks, they discovered they both were in-terested in photography and astronomy and craved the Saudi rice dish kabsa, reports The New York Times.

Their mobile phones both had the Backstreet Boys song with

the lyrics: “I don’t care who you are/Where you’re from/Or what you did/As long as you love me.” They got engaged, exchanging rings and completing a contract to marry in an Islamic court.

But theirs is a love unfulfilled. Dalia Shurrab, 32, lives here in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, and Rashed Sa-meer Faddah, 35, in the West Bank city of Nablus. Romance is not among the humanitarian reasons for which Israel allows Palestinians to travel from here to there.

Now, the couple has started a Facebook campaign calling on President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority to “De-liver the Bride to the Groom.”

“I have the love of my life — he’s really warm and kind, he always tries to make me hap-py, he’s proud of me,” Shurrab said, blushing and giggling as she shared their story. “When we cannot achieve what we are dreaming of, it dies slowly in-side of us.”

In a report last year, two Israeli groups, B’Tselem and HaM-

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oked, documented dozens of cases in which Israel, which lies between the territories, prevent-ed Palestinians from passing through for weddings, funerals or other needs.

Israeli policies have “made daily life unbearable for families split between the two areas,” the re-port argued. International law enshrines “the right to family life,” it said, yet for many Pales-tinians, “the simplest matters — starting a family, living together with one’s spouse and children, and keeping in regular contact with the families of origins of both partners — can no longer be taken for granted.”

Shurrab says she is focusing her appeals on President Ab-bas, not Israel, because “he’s responsible for the Palestinian people.” She imagines that Pal-estinian officials could some-how intervene on her behalf since they coordinate with Israel on security issues.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, Abbas’s spokesman, did not return a text message. The president’s me-dia department did not respond to an email inquiry.

Xavier Abu Eid of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which President Abbas also heads, said in an email that the cou-ple was in “an awful situation that reflects the nightmare that thousands of Palestinian fami-

lies have due to Israeli apartheid policies,” which “have been dra-matically radicalized in the last few years.”

The romance between Shurrab, a social-media marketer, and Faddah, a technician at an elec-tricity company, was certainly unconventional in a conservative society in which many marriages are arranged. But their families reluctantly supported the union, and in 2012 Faddah’s father ac-companied him to Gaza to make the engagement formal.

Shurrab said her parents had received more than 20 propos-als from Gaza men, but they seemed to be after her salary, when she worked as a teacher, rather than her heart. Beyond love, she also imagines “my life in the West Bank will be easier than my life here in Gaza,” since the economic and security situa-tions are better. The couple has picked a paint color, peach, for the bedroom they hope to share soon.

Though her requests to marry in Nablus have been denied, Shur-rab was allowed to go to the West Bank last May for a busi-ness creativity competition. Fad-dah came to see her at a Jeri-cho hotel, and she thought about sneaking away with him, but worried it would harm the others in her group.

So they are left with text mes-

sages, the occasional love note carried by travel-ers from one place to the other, and sketchy Skype conversations dependent on Gaza’s intermittent electricity.

“What are you doing?” he asked when they connect-ed one evening last week.

“I’m waiting for you,” she replied.

She smiled when he told her he had white beans for lunch. She had white beans, too.

Every day, Shurrab irons the lacy white gown and veil she had a seamstress make for $400 three years ago, because, she said, “I want to be ready and look like a princess with Rashed.”

She savors photographs from their four days togeth-er in Gaza: They stood at the sea, ate ice cream in the street, and had a formal engagement party at which Faddah placed shiny gold jewelry on her neck, wrist and ears, the bridegroom’s traditional “shabka” gift to his betrothed.

8 Feb 2015 Source: NY Times

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Turkey seeks to boost trade ties with Palestine

The Palestinian economy should be improved through better do-mestic production and not through donations alone, Turkish and Pal-estinian economy ministers said Saturday.

“The most important thing we must do for Palestine is this: ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ That’s how we look at Palestine,” Economy Min-ister Nihat Zeybekci said at the Palestine Business Forum held in Istanbul.

The minister said that he would like to see Palestine “back on its feet,” and “reach a state where it can re-build itself.”

“I want people, especially young people, children and girls to have a future. If the young people (in Pal-estine) do not have a dream about the future, then there is only one thing left: violence,” he said.

To this end, Zeybekci said Turkey is ready to abolish visas for Pales-tinian businessmen.

“It is not appropriate to ask for a visa from Palestinian businessmen who want to come to Turkey. We will do whatever it takes to put an end to this.”

Zeybekci also underlined the im-portance of increasing the trade volume between the two countries, and in particular, the volume of im-ported goods from Palestine.

“Right now, Turkey exports $280

million worth of goods to Palestine whereas the imports are only worth $5 million. This must change,” Zeybekci said, adding that Turkey would like to help reverse this trend.

“We already have a free trade agreement between us, and we are ready to do whatever we can to extend its scope,” he said.

Palestine’s Minister of National Economy and Deputy Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa said for his part that they need to strengthen the country’s economy, and increase the share of the national industry from 13 percent to 25 percent of the economy.

“There has been an increase in unemployment and a drop in national income since we are dependent on Israel. So we need to strengthen our national economy,” he said, adding that this must not be achieved through donations, but through domestic production.

Mustafa said that the Palestinian government was also working to “in-tegrate Gaza back in the national economy,” as it had a “significant share prior to Israel’s embargo.”

“Israel does not let us rebuild Gaza, but we won’t give up. We will re-build Gaza despite all the difficulties.”

The minister also vowed to rebuild Al-Quds, another name for Jerusa-lem.

“Likewise, the economy of Al-Quds is also under Israeli embargo. Al-Quds is the capital of the Palestinian state. And its economy is the economy of the Palestinian state. Therefore, we will rebuild it just like we will Gaza,” he said.

07 February 2015 Source: Agencies

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Rights group: 400 Palestinians detained by Israel in January

400 Palestinians were arrested by the Israeli occupation authorities (IOA) in the month of January, amounting to around 13 captives per day, the Arab Group for Development and National Empowerment said.

According to a statement by the Geneva-based group, the 400 detainees included around 57 minors and 18 women.

The group said that most of the detainees were from the West Bank and Jerusalem. 15 of them were Gazans, including four fishermen captured while working. Some other four captives were businessmen and merchants detained at the Erez crossing.

In January the IOA issued orders for the administrative detention, with neither charge nor trial, of more than 100 Palestinians.

The IOA also renewed the administrative prison-terms of dozens of Palestinian captives, bringing the number of administrative prisoners locked up in the Israeli occupation jails to around 500 Palestinians.

The Arab Group for Development and National Empowerment also voiced concern regarding the striking up-surge in random and mass abductions targeting Palestinians, including women and children.

The group called on the international community to urgently step in and work on halting such arbitrary abduc-tion campaigns, which make part of an Israeli collective punishment policy perpetrated against Palestinian civilians on a daily basis.

8 Feb 2015 Source: PIC

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Israeli Insider

Israel to dismiss 3 officials who criticised Netanyahu

Three senior Israeli officials, including an ambassador, are to be dismissed by the foreign ministry following Tweets they published criticising Prime Min-ister Benjamin Netanyahu, lo-cal media reported yesterday.

Ambassador to Switzerland Yigal Caspi and two other dip-lomats Assaf Moran from the New Delhi embassy and Yaron Gamburg from the Paris em-bassy after they retweeted messages critical of Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

All the three officials have been recalled to Israel for investiga-tion and punishment.

“These three workers have been removed from their posts immediately,” a foreign ministry source was quoted as saying according to Times of Israel. “The three of them will have a hearing before being fired, as the minister instructed.”

The source also said: “It is un-acceptable for employees, who are supposed to represent the country, to write these kinds of things about the prime minister, about ministers, and about the

country.”

“If this is against freedom of speech,” the source said: “They can do so as private individuals, but not when they are civ-il servants who are supposed to represent us around the world.”

Caspi retweeted messages from several Israeli journalists, some of which were highly critical of the government as well as of Netanyahu’s upcoming visit to Washington.

One of the tweets retweeted on Caspi’s account was origi-nally posted by the Haaretz daily’s diplomatic correspon-dent, Barak Ravid, who had complained that “every time one thinks Netanyahu has taken the relationship with the White House to the lowest point ever, he manages to take it even lower.”

Both Gamburg and Moran had retweeted comments from other users criticizing Netanyahu and other members of his cabinet.

Thursday, 05 February 2015 Source: MEMO

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How Israel freezes Palestinian revenue

Israel is likely to withhold millions in funds from Palestinians until well after the elections in March, a move that many in Palestine believe will cause damage to the Palestinian economy. The move comes just one month after the Palestin-ian Authority announced it had applied to join the ICC which means Palestinians can request the court to indict Israeli of-ficials for war crimes. Many see this Is-raeli measure as a retaliation for apply-ing to the ICC.

After the PA had applied to the ICC, the Israeli government - a move criticised by the US - froze the tax and custom rev-enues worth $127 million. This revenue represents about 60% of the PA monthly budget, which is used to for salaries for thousands of civil servants in the West Bank and the Gaza strip, which included teachers, nurses, and policemen. Ac-cording to Said Haifa, charmain of the Deparment of Economics at Bir Zeit Uni-veristy, “with many civil servants taking out mortgages - a new phenomenon for Palestinians - it means life comes to a standstill as people cannot meet their commitments and cover their expenses”.

To be able to make sense of the Israel’s ability to simply cut off their revunue at will, a step back to the Paris accord is necessary. Up to 1994, when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed the Paris Economic Proto-col, the economic appendix to the Oslo Peace Accords, the Israeli military had directly administered trade with the ter-ritories since their occupation in 1967.

While the accord reeked of rhetoric, it turned into law the informal customs

that were already in place, permanently binding Palestinians al-most entirely to Israel’s trade policy, and preventing the Palestinian economy from growing, stunting them and making them dependent on Israel - the lower “internal” taxes left Palestinian businesses no choice but to import goods from Israeli markets rather than the outside world. This forces 70 to 90% of the imports of Palestine to come from Israel.

Israel’s exclusive right to collect taxes on imports at both exter-nal Israeli ports and “internal” crossings with the Palestinians On the remaining crossings where Palestinians have a right to collect taxes, Israel has repeatedly refused to allow the presence of Pal-estinian custom agents.

It is through these arrangements that import taxes owed to the Palestinian Authority go through Israel and ultimately their decision if the money goes back to the PA or in this case, or not. Israel’s control over Palestinian trade taxes is the direct result of Israel’s refusal to agree to sovereign Palestinian borders (the so-called two-state solution), which is necessary for independent fiscal tax collection.

All these factors serve Israel’s agenda and is the reason Israeli Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett claims that a no-state frame-work for the Palestinians as a plan for peace is not acceptable.


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IOF arrests 9, summons 2 teens for interrogation

Israeli army and police forces

Sunday arrested nine Palestin-

ians in the West Bank, including

a minor from East Jerusalem,

as well as summoned two teen-

agers for interrogation, accord-

ing to local sources.

In Jenin, in the northern West

Bank, witnesses said Israeli sol-

diers arrested eight Palestinians

while they were present outside

Salim military compound, wait-

ing for the release of a Palestin-

ian prisoner. The eight, ranging

in age between 17 and 22, are

from Balata refugee camp in

Nablus.

Earlier in Jerusalem, Israeli

police broke into the Bab Hitta

neighborhood in Jerusalem’s

Old City, where they arrested

minor Mohammad Sharifa from

inside his family’s home, report-

ed witnesses. He was taken to

an Israeli interrogation center in

Hebron.

Meanwhile, Israeli army forces

stormed the city of Bethlehem

and the nearby Hebron’s town

of Beit Ummar, where they

handed notifications to two

Pales tinians, aged 17 and 19,

to appear for interrogation at

the military compound in Gush

Etzion settlement bloc.

In the meantime, army conduct-

ed a large-scale search opera-

tion in the town of Ya’bad, west

of Jenin; they raided four homes

and questioned their residents.

February 8, 2015 Source: WAFA

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Killing by another means

Charlotte Silver

03 Feb 2015

A new new report published by Physicians for Human Rights in Israel(PHR) finds stark dispari-ties between the health of Pal-estinians and Israelis.

Looking at the grim findings in the report we learn that infant mortality among Palestinian children is five times higher than that of Israeli children; Palestin-ian life expectancy is, on aver-age, 10 years less than Israelis (a gap that appears to be grow-ing); and Palestinian women die in childbirth - in cases that are nearly all preventable - at a rate that is four times greater than Israeli women.

The premature mortality of Palestinians, revealed in sta-tistics, is not only the result of the outright violence they suffer by Israeli soldiers’ and snipers’ bullets or even bombing cam-paigns. It is the result of a ubiq-uitous, accretive, and noxiously unhealthy environment, born of and sustained by the insidious control Israel exercises over Palestinians.

For example, the report tells us that today, the leading cause of death among Palestinians is from cardiac diseases. Tech-nological advances in this field

Articles & Analyses

have made most of these dis-eases highly treatable, dramati-cally reducing fatalities.

Access denied

However, because of Israel’s embargo on travel permits, Pal-estinian doctors are routinely denied access to education in these developments in tech-niques and equipment.

Furthermore, while Israel’s con-trol over movement and travel has made it nearly impossible for Palestinian doctors to spe-cialise in areas in dire need of practitioners, or even work in hospitals that serve Palestin-ians, the Palestinian Author-ity is responsible for paying for Palestinians’ treatment abroad. As a result, 30 percent of the Palestine’s Ministry of Health’s budget is devoted to sending Palestinians elsewhere for ad-

equate care.

While Israel, the occupying power, abdicated responsibil-ity for Palestinian healthcare in 1994, it has maintained control over all determining factors for their health prospects - whether that is access to a specialist, the latest medical technology, clean water, or a nutritious diet.

But some of the most stunning findings in this new report are in fact not new. For example, 20 years ago, in June 1995, PHR in Israel asked why children in Gaza were dying from heart de-fects that were operable.

But in Gaza there was neither a paediatric cardiologist nor the equipment and facilities needed to perform surgeries that could save those childrens’ lives - all vestiges of the underdeveloped medical infrastructure created

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by Israel during its direct occu-pation.

The 27 years of direct Israeli occupation - prior to the Oslo Accords - had seen a set of contradictory developments; an underdeveloped healthcare sector paradoxically coupled with an enhancement of certain services, such as the routinised administration of vaccines for children, an increase in women giving birth in hospital settings, and even a higher caloric intake.

Infant mortality reduced

In 1997, Israeli professor and author, Neve Gordon, wrote that during the 27 years of Israel’s direct occupation, Palestinian infant mortality was reduced by three-fifths and life expec-tancy grew but both still lagged behind Israel and “developed” countries.

After detailing the woefully in-adequate healt care to which Palestinians had access, Gor-don indicted Israel with violat-ing the Geneva Conventions of 1949 “which stipulates that the adequacy of healthcare servic-es must be determined by the extent to which the real medical needs of a population are being met”.

Israel’s healthcare system for Palestinians, in place from 1967 to 1994, provided a veneer of parity with Israelis’, allowing the last 20 years to pass with no improvement to, and some de-terioration in, Palestinian health prospects.

In fact, the strategies of the oc-cupation’s healthcare system

had been designed by Israel to maintain order while assisting in the larger project to dismantle geographic boundaries between the Israel established on Pales-tinian lands in 1948, and those of the West Bank and Gaza.

At the turn of the millennium, two former chief medical offi-cers for the Civil Administration wrote: “The overall goal was to keep the population satis-fied and quiet, and to provide a stable, calm, and reasonable background for future negotia-tions that would lead to a politi-cal solution.”

The strategy certainly did not provide a framework for a good healthcare system for occupied Palestinians, but it may have whittled away a bit at the more glaring disparities between Is-raeli and Palestinian health in order to lay a groundwork for long-term occupation, and, yes, a “political solution” - wherein the longest military occupation in history is regarded as normal.

It is easy to fixate on individual life choices as causal factors for life expectancy, but as the re-port’s dismal findings make very clear, the general health of a population is the consequence of environmental and social fac-tors that lie far beyond individu-als’ control.

For Palestinians, their control is limited by a hermetically sealed border, a beleaguered budget out of their control, checkpoints, blocked roads, disconnected water pipes, and old hospitals with outdated equipment and few medicines.

The strategy certainly did not provide a framework for a good healthcare

system for occupied Palestinians, but it may have whittled

away a bit at the more glaring disparities

between Israeli and Palestinian health in order to lay a

groundwork for long-term occupation

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issue no 121

Documents

palestinian sites

palestinian structures

palestinian fishermen

palestinian revenue

recent egyptian court

targeted egyptian military

egyptian lawyer

egyptian judge