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.

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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.

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Palestinian Women – The Disproportionate Impact of the Israeli Occupation

INTRODUCTION

Since 2000, UNRWA has delivered emergency programming in West Bank and Gaza with the aim of protecting vulnerable refugee population from the worst effects of the countermeasures which Israel has deployed against the intifada. The first six months of 2005 have borne witness to a welcome decrease in deaths and injuries on both sides of the conflict and an end to the widespread practice of home demolitions in Gaza. T he disengagement of Israel forces from Gaza is a further welcome development and will have a major impact on the personal security and quality of life of those Palestinians living in the enclaves and in the areas bordering settlements, army bases and the so-called "Philadelphi corridor" along Gaza's border with Egypt.

However in the face of these positive developments, no improvement has been noted, or is forecast in the short-term, in the macro-economic indicators in oPt. The internal closure regime remains the biggest inhibitor of economic revival in the West Bank and the completion of the barrier's route around Jerusalem is near. Israel has marginally relaxed its restrictions on the number of workers entering Israel but no significant increase is planned in the post-disengagement era. The future potential of access to Gaza by sea and air routes remains latent.

In the light of its experience over the past five years, the Agency remains convinced, of the value of its emergency programming. Trust in the Agency among Palestinians in Gaza remains very high, as was demonstrated by a survey conducted by FAFO, the independent Norwegian research foundation, between 3 August and 9 September. Some 78 percent expressed confidence in UNRWA, compared with 24 percent for the Palestinian Legislative Council and the Palestinian Authority Council of Ministers.

UNRWA's conviction about the need for its emergency programme requires validation. In addition to the usual quantitative information, in this report the Agency reviews the changes in the situation over the past six months and includes the results of a number of focus groups and personal interviews. This research was undertaken by external researchers in mid-2005 and their results vividly convey the positive impact which emergency programming has had, and continues to have, on the lives of Palestine refugees in this transitional period.

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The Government of Japan and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) have signed an agreement, under which the Government of Japan will contribute 500 million yen (around US$4.76 million) for UNRWA’s food assistance programme benefiting needy Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The agreement, which was signed by Japan’s Ambassador to Jordan Mr. Koichi Obata and UNRWA's Commissioner-General Mr. Peter Hansen, will enable UNRWA to distribute wheat flour and pulses to needy refugee families registered with UNRWA as Special Hardship Cases.

Japan, a major donor of cash and food assistance to UNRWA, has also been a generous contributor to projects implemented by the Agency in the five fields of operations. Recently the Japanese Government announced a $15 million contribution to UNRWA’s Emergency Appeal for 2005. This will enable UNRWA to implement a large-scale rehousing project in Rafah, Gaza, for refugees whose homes were demolished by the Israeli military and to create jobs in the Gaza Strip, where unemployment is extremely high.

The Japanese Government’s contributions to UNRWA’s regular budget, food aid and projects over the last 10 years has amounted to more than $160 million.

UNRWA provides basic education, health, relief and social services for more than 4.1 million Palestine refugees registered with the Agency.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, paid a visit to the West Bank operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) today to lay a wreath at the memorial to UNRWA staff who have lost their lives in the duty of the United Nations and to publicly bid farewell to Peter Hansen, UNRWA’s outgoing Commissioner-General.

Mr. Annan, accompanied by his wife, laid a wreath at the monument to Kamal Salem and Iain Hook who were both killed in separate incidents in the West Bank in 2002 while on duty for UNRWA.

The Secretary-General then addressed a large group of UNRWA staff to express his profound respect for the courage and devotion they bring to their jobs in very difficult and sometimes dangerous situations. Mr. Annan then took questions from UNRWA’s staff.

Mr. Annan also thanked Peter Hansen for the nine years of service he has given to the Agency. In a recent letter to all UNRWA staff the Secretary General described the Commissioner-General as “not only a careful and efficient manager, but also an inspiring leader, a persuasive advocate and a consummate diplomat with acute political antennae”.

Mr. Annan’s letter said: “No one could have been more wholeheartedly devoted to the interests of the Palestine refugees, or more courageous in championing them, particularly during the last four years of renewed conflict and tragic violence. He has made many friends, and he has had the courage also to make some enemies.”

Mr. Hansen then accompanied the Secretary General, along with other heads of UN agencies in the region, to visits with the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah.

Meanwhile Mrs. Annan visited the Ramallah Women’s Training Centre (RWTC), a college run by UNRWA since the 1960s to give training and career opportunities to female refugees. The Secretary- General’s wife met and spoke with students at the college’s graphic design unit and those studying nursing, ceramics, jewellery-making and pre-school teacher training.

At the college Mrs. Annan had lunch with Mrs. Karen Koning AbuZayd, Deputy Commissioner- General of UNRWA, Anders Fange UNRWA’s Director of Operations in the West Bank, Timothy Rothermel, Special Representative of the UNDP Administrator, Dan Rohrmann, UNICEF Special Representative, Alia Al-Yassir, UNIFEM Programme Coordinator and Principal Jarbawi of the RWTC.

Preface:

UNRWA's task of providing services to a population of over 4 million refugees in a volatile environment is an enormous challenge. This plan examines how to maintain the quality and efficiency of basic education, health and social services, while seeking ways to better promote human development and self-reliance, including through an extended microfinance programme, a strategy for camp up-grading and increased opportunities for vocational training. It also considers possible changes in the political and economic environment of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that could drastically alter the operational context of the Agency in those areas.

This plan is not simply an internally drafted blue-print, rather it is a framework that has been informed by a process of intensified dialogue with stake-holders, before, during and after the holding of a major international conference in Geneva in June 2004. It is not a prescriptive plan. It is an outline meant to accommodate changing realities and needs on the ground and a reference point for further dialogue and onward planning.

I view this effort as a testimony to the commitment of UNRWA and its working partners to help the Palestine refugee population live in dignity and achieve their ambitions for self-reliance and development.

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