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

Israel’s disengagement process from the Gaza Strip will necessarily shape a new geopolitical reality, one of whose salient components will be a system of borders between the emerging Palestinian entity in the Gaza Strip and Israel, Egypt and the rest of the world (the air and sea ports). The management of the various borders and the regime enacted in them will have a substantial impact on the nature of the bilateral relations between Israel and the PA, as well as on the nature of the relations between the PA and Egypt and the rest of the world, and the nature of the relations between Israel and Egypt.

The disengagement process can be viewed as an opportunity for the parties involved to shape a new political reality that can open a window to the renewal of the political process that will lead to the improvement of the relations between the parties and to political prospect that can lay the groundwork for more advanced measures.

Supposing that the disengagement process can be converted from a unilateral Israeli process to a coordinated bilateral (Israeli-Palestinian) process, with the assistance of international elements, the parties are facing an opportunity to jointly shape the nature of their common border regime.

As part of an encompassing strategic process that included the operation of 12 Israeli- Palestinian thinking teams which examined a series of issues and areas of interest with the purpose of developing a conceptual framework whose purpose was to break the political deadlock by leveraging the disengagement process for the renewal of the peace process, one team dealt with the question of the border regime.

In this document we would like to present the main recommendations formulated during the team’s work process, in an attempt to offer a possible conceptual framework for a border regime on the day after the disengagement. The policy document that was written in the Strategic Affairs Unit of IPCRI present guiding principles and a conceptual framework for the border regime for the day after the disengagement, based on the assumption that the disengagement is an opportunity that could be leveraged into a political process. The document is based on recommendations developed by the Israeli- Palestinian team in addition to elements added since the team completed its original work.

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The Palestinian Authority (PA) established the Curriculum Development Center (CDC) in 1994. It was commissioned with formulating a Palestinian vision of a national educational policy and of a national curriculum. Work on a comprehensive framework was completed in 1996. Shortly after that, the PA’s Ministry of Education (MOE) established a new curriculum center commissioned with writing new school textbooks. The curriculum plan assumed concrete form during the 2000-2001 school year.

In the past three years, the Palestinian MOE introduced a number of new textbooks and a few teachers’ guides for grades 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8. The production of these textbooks involved hundreds of authors, reviewers, supervisors, teacher trainers, illustrators and technical support personnel.

The present investigation is an earnest attempt to present a professional analysis/evaluation of the new Palestinian curriculum, especially as it relates to the principles of civil society, peace, tolerance and diversity. It covers all textbooks that relate to the objectives and tasks of the investigation. However, a special focus is placed on language arts, religious education, history, civil education, and national education curricula.