Posted By Emma Sabry 

"Perhaps Palestinians are not the most punished people on earth, but they are indeed the most openly punished people on earth. Perhaps they are not the people who have suffered the most but they are the people whose sufferings are the most uninterruptedly visible,” Spanish philosopher Santiago Alba Rice wrote last year. 

In fact, Israeli crimes against the Palestinians are being committed on a daily basis before the eyes of the world. If a day passes with no civilian casualties, then you will certainly hear about homes being demolished, farms bulldozed, fields torched, or a new colony being planned for construction on stolen Arab land. 

Portuguese Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, described Israel’s violations of the Palestinians’ human rights during a visit to the occupied West Bank in 2002. "I didn’t know that in order to protect a few people, farmland had to be confiscated and crops had to be destroyed; I didn’t know that in order to provide security for a few people, hundreds had to be kept waiting at checkpoints and roadblocks before being allowed to return home exhausted, that is if they are not killed." 

To illustrate this, let’s take a look at what happened in the occupied West Bank in the past couple of days: 

On Wednesday 9 May 2007, Israeli occupation forces raided the West Bank city of Nablus. During the incursion, in the Ein Beit Ilma refugee camp, a stray Israeli bullet penetrated the bedroom wall of a pregnant Palestinian woman and hit her eight-month-old foetus. Maha Katoumi is now fighting for her life in hospital. Her doctor said that the “bullet hit the foetus in the head after penetrating the mother’s womb.” 

The death of the baby boy, whom Maha wanted to name Dawood, raises the number of Palestinian children murdered by Israeli occupation forces since 2000 to 853. 

Also Wednesday, a World Bank report accused Israel of hampering the growth of the Palestinian economy by a network of barriers, roadblocks, wire fencing and concrete walls that carve up the West Bank into a dozen enclaves and deny the Palestinians their right to access more than half of the occupied territories. 

"Sustainable economic recovery will remain elusive if large areas of the West Bank remain inaccessible for economic purposes," the World Bank report said. 

On Friday 11 May, Israeli occupation forces torched hundreds of hectares of harvest-ready fields in several parts of the occupied West Bank. 

On the same day, Israeli soldiers attacked a group of peace activists, including Jewish settlers, as they attempted to remove rocks blocking a major road linking the West Bank city of Hebron with the town of Dahiriya. 

Around the same time, Israeli troops arrested more than 51 Palestinians and sent them to a notorious detention centre in the Negev desert, where prisoners are often held in appalling conditions for months or years, either on fabricated charges or with no charges at all. 

More than 11,000 Palestinians are being detained in Israeli prisons. A new report by two Israeli human right groups, B'Tselem and the HaMoked Centre for the Defense of the Individual, accused the Israeli Security Agency of routinely abusing Palestinian detainees, saying that in some cases the ill-treatment amounted to torture. 

Also Friday, the Israeli government announced plans to build three new Jewish neighborhoods in Arab East Jerusalem, an area considered occupied under international law. The new construction plan, under which 20,000 new homes would be built for Jewish settlers, is aimed at creating a contiguous Jewish residential area linking East Jerusalem with major West Bank settlement blocs, said Yehoshua Pollak, Jerusalem's deputy mayor, confirming recent reports that Israel is concerned by figures showing that, over the past decade, the number of Arabs living in Jerusalem has grown twice as fast as the city's Jewish population.

The announcement sparked Palestinian condemnation and unveiled the ugliness of the Israeli occupation. 

Israel seized East Jerusalem in 1967, and annexed the area is 1981 in a move not recognized by the international community. About 260,000 Jewish settlers and 2.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank. The World Court has branded all Israeli settlements as illegal. Moreover, settlement expansion and construction in the occupied West Bank violate a U.S.-backed Israeli-Palestinian peace plan known as the "road map", which calls for an independent state for the Palestinians. 

"A halt to settlement expansion is one of the basic obligations" in the Quartet's so-called roadmap for peace, UN chief Ban Ki-moon’s spokeswoman said on Friday. "Furthermore East Jerusalem is occupied territory, and its ultimate status is subject to negotiations between the parties," Michele Montas added. 

Jerusalem is one of the main obstacles to reaching a final peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Israel considers all of Jerusalem its eternal capital. The Jewish state built its major settlement blocs on West Bank land just outside east Jerusalem, and says it would hold on to it in any final peace deal.

On the other hand, the Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of any future Palestinian state. They fear the territory would never be split between them and the Israelis. 

The construction of the new settlement makes it impossible for any future Israeli government to return Arab East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. In other words, the plan effectively kills Palestinian hopes of a peaceful settlement based on a two-state solution formula. 

“The Israeli government must choose between settlements and peace. They can not have both,” Palestinian chief negotiator said. 

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Sheikh Mohammad Al-Mufti said the construction is part of a wider Israeli plan to Judaize Jerusalem and kick the Palestinians out of it. 

"The occupation authorities have been buildings thousands of construction units while tightening the noose around the Palestinians with construction of the racial separation wall and imposition of heavy taxes,” Sheikh Mufti said. 

With such acts, the occupation authority violates international and heavenly laws, he added

©  EsinIslam.Com

Add Comments