Israel says the barrier protects it against suicide bombers A senior United Nations official has sharply criticised Israel's West Bank security barrier.

The barrier violates important aspects of international humanitarian law, said the UN's special rapporteur for the occupied territories, John Dugard.

He said the barrier was causing anxiety among the Palestinian population.

Israel says it needs the barrier to defend itself from suicide bombers and has accused the human rights commission of bias.

In a highly critical 13-page report presented to the UN Human Rights Commission, John Dugard says the barrier has caused widespread destruction of Palestinian property and that the seizure of land to build it took place without due process of law.

Now that the wall is largely built, he says families have been divided and many are denied access to health and education.

The only beneficiaries of the barrier, the report says, are Israeli settlers, who are likely to gain land which has been seized from Palestinians.

Annexation Accusation

Mr Dugard writes that the wall might have been justified if it had stuck to the so-called green line dividing Israeli and Palestinian territory.

But the fact that it extends far into Palestinian land suggests that its real purpose is the annexation of additional land for Israel.

Not surprisingly, Israel has reacted angrily to the report accusing the human rights commission of bias.

A statement by Yaakov Levy, the Israeli ambassador to the UN in Geneva, said Mr Dugard was less interested in reporting than he was in presenting a virtual reality that conformed to his own political agenda.

But the Human Rights Commission report is just the latest to be critical of the security barrier.

Last month the International Committee of the Red Cross said building it within occupied territory was in clear violation of international humanitarian law.

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.

To View this Report as PDF

To View the Full Statestics as PDF

The situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) continues to be a matter of grave concern. Although the road map promoted by the Quartet offers some prospect of peace in the region, it is important to record that the past six months have seen continued violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.

The Government of Israel has justified its actions in the OPT on the grounds of self-defence and portrayed them as anti-terrorism measures. That Israel has legitimate security concerns cannot be denied. On the other hand, some limit must be placed on the violation of human rights in the name of counter-terrorism. A balance must be struck between respect for human rights and the interests of security.

During the past few months the construction of the Wall, separating Israel from the West Bank, has been frenetically pursued. The Wall does not follow the Green Line, which marks the de facto boundary between Israel and Palestine. Instead, it incorporates substantial areas of the West Bank into Israel. Over 210,000 Palestinians will be seriously affected by the Wall. Palestinians living between the Wall and the Green Line will be effectively cut off from their farmlands and workplaces, schools, health clinics and other social services. This is likely to lead to a new generation of refugees or internally displaced persons.

The Wall has all the features of a permanent structure. The fact that it will incorporate half of the settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem suggests that it is designed to further entrench the position of the settlers. The evidence strongly suggests that Israel is determined to create facts on the ground amounting to de facto annexation. Annexation of this kind, known as conquest in international law, is prohibited by the Charter of the United Nations and the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Special Rapporteur submits that the time has come to condemn the Wall as an unlawful act of annexation in the same way that Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights has been condemned as unlawful. Similarly, no recognition should be given by the international community to Israel’s control over Palestinian territory enclosed by the Wall.

The restrictions on freedom of movement continue to create a humanitarian crisis in the OPT. Although curfews have not affected as many people in 2003 as in the previous year, they still disrupt Palestinian life on a broad scale. The number of checkpoints has increased during the past six months. These restraints on the movement of goods and persons give rise to unemployment, poverty, poor health care and interrupted education and, in addition, they result in the humiliation of the Palestinian people.

The death toll in the conflict continues to rise as a result of suicide bombings and military incursions. The Israeli practice of assassinating suspected terrorists has inflicted death and injury not only on those targeted but on a substantial number of innocent civilians in the vicinity of such actions. The legality of such measures is highly questionable.

There are some 6,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and detention centres. Although Israel has agreed to release 540 of them, its refusal to release more prisoners constitutes a major obstacle in the way of peace in the region. Sadly, allegations of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment continue to be made. The Special Rapporteur therefore calls for an independent inquiry into such allegations.

The destruction of property in the OPT continues unabated. During the past eight months, Gaza has been particularly affected by military action that has caused large-scale devastation to houses and agricultural land.

Israel’ s undertaking to curb the growth of settlements has not been implemented. On the contrary, settlements have continued to grow at an unacceptable pace. This phenomenon, together with the construction of the Wall, suggests that territorial expansion remains an essential feature of Israel’ s policies and practices in the OPT.