The shocking human cost that occupation has taken on Palestinian women is laid bare in research published today. Combining research, extensive surveys, and first-hand testimonies from over 40 Palestinian women, Palestinian Women: The Disproportionate Impact of The Israeli Occupation provides new insight into the gendered experience of occupation, looking into four issues in particular:

• women refugees
• the impact of residency revocation on Palestinian women in Jerusalem
• the experience of women prisoners
• Gazans’ access to health

Co-authored by four Palestinian NGOs – the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH), Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development (PWWSD), the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC), and Women Media and Development (TAM), the report includes detailed findings that demonstrate how the oppression occupation has permeated women’s daily lives, and the particular impact is has had on women in Palestinian refugee camps, Palestinian women living in Jerusalem, women prisoners, and residents of Gaza who require health services.

The impact on refugee women

Researchers spoke to 500 Palestinian refugee women from 12 Palestinian camps (7 in the West Bank, 5 in Gaza). Their findings included the following:

• A third of women surveyed had been directly exposed to physical assault by Israeli Occupation Forces. 9% had been exposed to threats of being attacked by police dogs during Israeli night raids on their homes.
• Over a third (37%) of respondents had been exposed to detention or interrogation, while 38% said that they or members of their households had been exposed to verbal abuse during Israeli army raids, at checkpoints or while visiting religious places.
• Nearly a quarter (24%) were forced to live in shelters or with extended family. 22% were forced to live under unhealthy conditions. 13% stated that the female and male members of their families were separated as a result of having to live in shelters.
• More than one in five (21%) had been exposed to beatings or tear gas at Israeli checkpoints while they were pregnant. 4% reported that they aborted or gave birth at Israeli checkpoints.
• The majority (64%- 321 cases) had been unable to visit religious or recreational places because of Occupation restrictions.

Jerusalem: Residency Revocation and Family Reunification

According to official figures, 14,595 Palestinians from East Jerusalem had their residency status revoked between 1967 and the end of 2016.

Through residency revocations, Israel has separated husbands from wives, parents from children, and extended families from one another, causing traumatic complications for women attempting to remain with their families in both Jerusalem and the West Bank.

This leads to traumatic fears of separation from children for mothers and an entrenching of patriarchal practices across society. Palestinian women living in Jerusalem lose residency rights if they get divorced or their husbands remarry. Limiting their access to justice, female victims of domestic violence fear reporting abuse to authorities in case they are forcibly transferred away from their children.

Women prisoners

Since the beginning of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine in 1967, approximately 10,000 Palestinian women have been arrested and detained by Israeli military forces. According to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs’ 2017 annual report, 1,467 children were arrested last year.

Our researchers spoke to prisoners who experienced physical and psychological torture at arrest and imprisonment, and traumatic, gendered treatment, including:

• Women denied access to menstrual products while detained
• A woman arrested while pregnant who gave birth while chained to a prison hospital bed
• Ex-prisoners who report being subjected to rape and death threats during interrogation, including a girl in of 15-years old threatened with rape
• Women who were subjected to frequent forced and violent strip searches
• A prisoner who reported toothache, only to have the wrong tooth removed

Access to Health in Gaza

Israel exercises strict control Gaza’s borders, a policy of ‘actual authority’, constituting continued occupation, despite the withdrawal of its permanent presence. This control in particular affects those who need medical treatment outside of Gaza’s struggling health system, who require permission to leave. The report shows that the rate of approval applications is falling year-by-year:

• 92.5% of applications were successful in 2012
• 88.7% in 2013
• 82.4% in 2014
• 77.5% in 2015
• 62.1% in 2016

Of the 26,282 permit applications submitted by patients aiming to exit through Erez in 2016, 8,242 (31.4%) were delayed. Many applicants received no response from border authorities, even after lawyers filed formal applications on their behalf. These delays regularly extend months and years beyond medical appointments, worsening already life-threatening diseases and in some cases resulting in death.

Read the full report here, or download it here:

Palestinian Women – The Disproportionate Impact of the Israeli Occupation

Women represent half of the Palestinian population

The qualitative base of the structure of the population in Palestine the sex ratio stood at 103.3, which means that there are 103 males for every 100 females

The percentage of female-headed households

The percentage of female-headed households in Palestine was 10.6% in 2017, 11.2% in the West Bank and 9.5% in Gaza Strip.

fifth of the persons in Palestine got married at an early age (less than 18 years) in 2016

Early marriage reached to 20.5% among females and 1.0% among males of the total married population in Palestine; the rate was 19.9% out of the total married population in West Bank and 21.6% out of the total married population in Gaza Strip end 2016.

The highest rate of female early marriage in the West Bank was in Hebron 36.8%, and the lowest was in Jericho and the Jordan Valley 1.2% out of the total number of women marriage below 18 years in the West Bank. In Gaza Strip, the highest rate of early female marriage was 42.1% in Gaza Governorate, while the lowest rate was in Dier Al-Balah 7.1% out of the total number of women marriage below 18 years in Gaza Strip.

A continued rise in literacy among women

Despite the rise in literacy rates among females over the last decade, the gap is still in favor of males by 3.0%, female literacy rates was 95.6% compared to 98.6% for male literacy in the year 2017.

Rise in enrollment rate of females in high schools compared to males

Data showed that male enrollment in high schools was 60.5%, compared to female enrollment which was 80.4% for the year 2016-2017.

A gap in the participation rate and average daily wages between men and women

The female participation rate in the labor force was 19.0% of the total female population at work age in 2017, compared to 10.3% in 2001, while the male participation rate was 71.2% in 2017. There was also a pay gap in the average daily wages between males and females; the average daily wage for females was NIS 84.6 compared to NIS 119.6 for males.

Around half of the women are unemployed

The unemployment rate among women participated in the labor force was 47.4% compared to 22.3% for participated males. 65.8% of youth females aged of (15-29 years) were unemployed. While the unemployment rate among women with 13 school years and above represents 53.8% of women in this group.

Palestinian Women in Public Life

In 2017; 21.2% of the members of the local councils are females in the West Bank while 78.8% were males.

In 2016, 82.7% of judges were male, compared to 17.3% female, while 66.6% of registered lawyers were male, compared to 33.4% female and 82.0% of members of the public prosecution staff were male, compared to 18.0% female. Furthermore, Palestinian female ambassadors represented 5.8% compared to 94.2% male. Females represented 32.3% of registered engineers with the Union of Engineers while male represented 67.7%. On the other hand, in 2016, 12.4% of members of student councils in West Bank universities were females, compared to 87.6% males.

In the public sector, females represented 42.7% of civil servants, compared to 57.3% male civil servant. In the public civil sector, female Director Generals represented 11.3% of the total director generals, compared to 88.7% males in the same post.

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Eleven years ago this month, on September 13, 1993, the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was signed, and the famous handshake between the Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the west-side lawn of the White House secured its place in history. Much has been written on why the Oslo peace process has failed politically; yet less attention was paid to its failure to deliver on its promise of a different economic future for the Palestinians. Given the vitality of the economic factor in any future peace settlement, it is worth reflecting on this somehow forgotten dimension of the Oslo years, and to draw some useful lessons.

The economic component of Oslo process was predicated on a very simple proposition: providing international financial support to the newly created Palestinian Authority will help rebuild its infrastructure and attract private investment, so that by the end of a five-year interim period, the basic ingredients for success will be in place, and the economy will be on its way to prosperity. The prospects of success, it was believed then, would be further enhanced by regional political stability and economic cooperation spawned by the spirit of the 1991 Madrid peace conference.

The picture 11 years later, however, is, at best, disappointing.

By the end of the interim period, in May 1999, and despite the disbursement of close to $3 billion by the international community, the Palestinian economy continued to be highly dependent on Israel for employment and trade; public institutions were far from efficient or properly run; private sector remained mostly weak and incapable of taking the driver’s seat; and, on top of all this, Palestinian living standards did not show any marked improvement.

Worse still, and after four years of continued violence since the Palestinian Intifada erupted in September 2000, and the unpresedented use of the Israeli military force to quell the uprising, most of the foreign-financed infrastructure had been either destroyed or rendered dysfunctional; the Palestinian economy is virtually bankrupt; and, with one-third of the workforce is unemployed, and two of every three persons live on less than $2 a day, the 3.6 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, known in the region for their talent and energy, were largely reduced to welfare cases.

What led to this unfortunate outcome was an overly optimistic and simplistic economic vision that overlooked three critical questions: (1) whether the limited Palestinian sovereignty over a noncontiguous small territory, as produced by the Oslo Accords, was conducive to economic growth; (2) whether the PLO, without any previous experience in state-like economic management, was capable of pulling off such an ambitious endeavor; and (3) whether foreign aid, in this grossly inadequate political and institutional setting, would be effective to realize this transformation.

The lesson here is clear: any future attempt to revive the Palestinian economy will have first to address, and eventually fundamentally alter, the institutional and political-territorial setting that has caused its present near collapse.

In this context, the ongoing domestic struggle for institutional reform in the Palestinian Authority is a step in the right direction. But this by itself, vital as it is, will not be a panacea. The Palestinian people who were asked to bring to power a different leadership, have expectations of their own. They have not seen real improvements in their daily lives since the onset of the Oslo process. Their expectations need to be fulfilled, and the new leadership will have to deliver. The question, of course, is how this could be done, and the full impact of reform be materialized, without a concurrent and significant change in the present messy political-territorial environment.

Furthermore, international resources will still be needed to reconstruct the Palestinian economy, and will be better utilized in a revamped Palestinian entity. But again, one could legitimately question the potential effectiveness of yet another round of development aid if the rigid post-Oslo political-territorial setting, largely recognized by donors themselves to be the most important factor responsible for the ineffectiveness of the first round of foreign aid, is not drastically altered.

The Palestinians today are facing dire living conditions that call for urgent measures to mitigate their suffering and provide them with life’s basic needs. These, however, are emergency measures needed to deal with the present humanitarian crisis. But to create the right environment that enables a reform-oriented Palestinian government to conduct policies conducive to creating real domestic jobs and achieving sustainable growth— something the economy was not able to provide or experience over the past four decades— nothing short of a real negotiated political settlement that leads to an end of the 37-year-long Israeli military control of the Palestinian people and their land will have the chance to work.

Such a political settlement would provide the missing element in the economic transition equation in the Palestinian areas, and would make both reformers and donors in a better position to deliver.

Out of all possible lessons one could think of, this, probably, is the most visible one, with far-reaching policy implications to all concerned parties. Given the present economic crisis in the occupied Palestinian territories and its devastating future consequences, such a lesson should not go unnoticed.

The writer is a Palestinian economist, currently serving as a senior economic adviser to the Palestinian minister for foreign affairs.