Executive Summary

The ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip has compounded several humanitarian and legal violations, particularly inrelation to the reproductive rights of Palestinian women. Since the launch of its military offensive in October 2023, Israelhas systematically targeted Palestinian women in ways that undermine their ability to survive, give birth, and raisechildren. More than 12,300 women have been killed, 4,700 women and children are missing, and approximately 800,000women have been forcibly displaced. An estimated one million women and girls now suffer from acute food insecurity.Israel’s actions constitute a deliberate attempt to impair the reproductive capacities of Palestinian women, aimed atdismantling the future of Palestinian society. Through the bombing of shelters, destruction of hospitals, blockading ofmedical and hygiene supplies, and attacks on fertility clinics and maternity wards, Israel’s policy of erasure is notincidental, it is intentional.

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Executive Summary

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is vital inproviding humanitarian aid, education, and health services to Palestinian refugees across Jordan, Lebanon,Syria, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Beyond its humanitarian role, UNRWA represents aninternational commitment to Palestinian refugees' right of return, as established in UN General AssemblyResolution 194 in 1948. However, Israel has long sought to undermine the agency through financial, political,and military means.Recent Israeli actions have escalated, with the Israeli Knesset passing legislation banning UNRWAoperations in areas under Israeli control, effectively revoking its legal status. Concurrently, Israel hasintensified military attacks on UNRWA facilities. In the Gaza Strip since October 2023, Israeli forces havetargeted 310 UNRWA sites, destroying schools and killing 273 UNRWA employees alongside hundreds ofcivilians sheltering in its facilities. Throughout the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military has been turningUNRWA facilities into military bases and detention centers, and has closed UNRWA’s headquarters in EastJerusalem. These actions violate multiple international legal agreements and aim to erase Palestinian refugeeidentity and their legal rights.

To view the Full Policy Paper as PDF

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

The Foreign Office decision to withdraw British observers on 14th of March from the Jericho Prison without prior arrangements gave Israel the opportunity to demolish and kidnap Palestinians.

The strong Palestinian response to this was only expected, as Britain (and the US) were seen to be colluding with Israel by violating the Ramallah Agreement.

The Israeli army's unquestionable entry into Palestinian territory and Israeli record of prisoner torture raises fears for their safety. The extreme nature of the siege on the prison was once again a show of disproportionate mite against unarmed Palestinians by Israel, and in line with its policy of ignoring most international laws and customs.

The undersigned organisations all call upon the Foreign Office to unequivocally condemn Israel's actions in Jericho Prison, and demand that the Palestinian prisoners be handed back over to the Palestinian Authority to be tried or released.

For further comments or interviews, please contact:

Betty Hunter: 07763384841
Zaher Birawi: 07747446001

Signed by:
Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB)
Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC)
Palestinian Return Centre (PRC)
Association of the Palestinian Community in the UK,
Friends of Al-Aqsa
British Muslim Initiative (BMI).

British Government has to honour its responsibility towards Palestinian Prisoners

Palestinian Community in Britain and Campaigners for Palestinian Rights Demand Answers from the British Government

Following the illegal actions of Israel in the storming of the Jericho prison and the kidnap of the Palestinian nationalist leader Mr.Ahmad Sadat and others on Tuesday 14 March, a number of civil society bodies concerned with Palestinian rights will host a press conference to demand an explanation from the British government and action against the Israeli aggression.

The press conference will be on Friday 17th of March at 12.00 am in Room C, 1 Parliament Street .

Attending the press conference will be the Palestinian delegate to the UK, Dr. Manuel Hassassian and representatives of the Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB), the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) , the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) , the Association of the Palestinian Community in the UK, Friends of Al-Aqsa and British Muslim Initiative(BMI).

We will press the British government to honour its legal and moral responsibility to ensure that Israel releases Mr. Sadat and his colleagues as well as the 9,000 other Palestinians detainees held in Israeli jails.

The press conference will be followed by a public picket in Parliament Square at 5:30pm on Friday 17 March.

END

16/03/06

For further comments or interviews, please contact:

Betty Hunter: 07763384841
Zaher Birawi: 07747446001

The way Jack Straw answered questions in the House today did nothing to persuade us that the British government has acted honestly or honourably in withdrawing British monitors from the Jericho prison and allowing Israeli forces to storm in, killing 2 and wounding 26 others.

Mr. Straw was invited by Peter Kilfoyle MP to condemn the Israeli actions but he did not do so. He cited the dangers British monitors face because of prison visits and use of mobile phones yet as he also said, Israeli intelligence knows everything that is going on in Palestine.

In 2002, the Palestinian High Court of Justice in Gaza ordered that Ahmad Sa‘adat be released immediately as there was no evidence connecting him to the crime of which he was accused and Amnesty International found the proceedings which convicted the accused, grossly unfair. Nevertheless, the PA did not release those accused.

One of the Israeli demands for lifting the siege was that those detained should be handed over to the Israeli authorities. However on 1 May 2002 they agreed a deal whereby the Palestinians detained in the compound were taken to Jericho to be imprisoned under the monitoring of UK and US warders.

The agreement by the UK and US to monitor these prisoners in the Jericho prison was clearly a compromise drawn up to prevent the killing of prisoners not properly convicted. Yet today the UK is complicit in a ferocious Israeli attack on the whole prison.

Last week the Palestinian Human Rights Commission, in cooperation with Hickman & Rose Solicitors, filed a lawsuit before the UK judiciary against the British government for its role in monitoring the illegal detention of Sa'adat in violation of the Palestinian High Court of Justice ruling. PCHR believes that this role violates international law and humanitarian law.

The British government has acted shamefully in this matter. Already at the prison, 2 people have been killed and 26 wounded. Is the British government prepared to see more murders and violence perpetrated?

For more information:

Betty Hunter 07763384841 or 02077006192 PSC
www.palestinecampaign.org
info@palestinecampaign.org
Tel: 02077006192

Palestinians inside Israeli borders have been systematically discriminated against in all aspects of life, economic, political and social dimensions. The second class status of Palestinian citizens caught media attention in October 2000 when the Israeli police killed 13 Palestinians in clashes. Many people are surprised to hear that there are Palestinians who live inside Israel. About 20% of the Israeli population, approximately one million citizens, are Palestinians.