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.

Read the full report here, or download it here:

Palestinian Women – The Disproportionate Impact of the Israeli Occupation

During this reporting period, the Israeli Army continued to violate the First and Fourth Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by denying freedom of movement to Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances and its medical teams, who were threatened by gunfire, humiliated and verbally abused. Delays, denial of access and arbitrary searches had a negative impact on the sick and the wounded in Jenin, Tubas, Jericho, Nablus and Bethlehem.

Jenin 12 July 2003 (14:30): Israeli soldiers at the Jannat checkpoint, which controls access to Jenin, stopped a PRCS ambulance on its way to the Ya'bad station. Israeli soldiers searched the ambulance and the crew and arrested one of the EMS medics at gunpoint, tying his hands behind his back and forcing him to sit on the ground next to the tank. As of this writing, the medic is still in detention.

Tubas 12 July 2003 (11:40): A PRCS ambulance transporting a patient from the Nablus EMS station to the village of Sadet Qarara was stopped by an Israeli jeep at the Sadet Qarara intersection. The crew was ordered to stay in the ambulance as the soldiers inspected their IDs and license. Twenty minutes later, the soldiers returned the IDs and the license but issued two fines without giving any explanation.

Jericho 17 July 2003 (10:15): A PRCS ambulance transporting two patients to Al-Maqassed Hospital and St. John's Ophthalmology Hospital, both in Jerusalem, was stopped by Israeli soldiers at the Za'em checkpoint. The soldiers demanded to see the crew's and the patients' IDs and the latter's referral slips. One of the patients was not carrying a referral slip, but had an appointment card for the Ophthalmology Hospital. After waiting for one half hour, the soldiers told the crew that they would be granted permission to cross the checkpoint. Forty-five minutes and still waiting, the soldiers changed their minds. They ordered the crew to turn back using threatening language. In total, the ambulance was detained for 75 minutes.

In addition to the above, the following table lists incidents of delay of access during this reporting period.

PRCS Branch Date Checkpoint Delay of Access (unless indicated 'denied access') Nablus 13/7/2003 Howwara 120 minutes 17/7/2003 Al Ram 50 minutes Bethlehem 17/7/2003 Gilo 105 minutes

These incidents constitute a breach of articles 19, 24 and 25 of the First Geneva Convention, which guarantees the protection of medical units, establishments and personnel, as well as articles 27, 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which calls for the protection of civilians.

December 13th, 2002 Israeli army blocked an on duty PRCS ambulance transporting a patient in the city of Nablus. An Israeli tank stopped the ambulance and soldiers ordered the medical team to take two Israeli soldiers to Askar Refugee Camp. When the medical team refused, the Israeli soldiers confiscated their National Identity Cards and forced them to follow the tank, acting as a shield, until they reached Salem checkpoint. There, soldiers checked the ambulance and an Israeli soldier held the EMT driver at gunpoint.

This latest Israeli aggression is yet another in a long string of violations of the Fourth Geneva Conventions specifically articles (34) & (147) which state that:

Article (34) “The taking of hostages is prohibited.”
Article (147) “Compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile power, or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Conventions, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”

The above actions are also in direct violation of the protocols additional to the Geneva Conventions specifically article (51) & (85)

Article (51) “The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used or render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular an attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations.

Article (85)(f) “The perfidious use, in violation of Article 37, of the distinctive emblem of the Red Cross, Red Crescent or Red Lion and Sun or of other protective signs recognized by the Conventions or this Protocol”

Furthermore, Israeli Occupation Forces once again violated International Law Concerning the Conduct of Hostilities that forbids “ improper use of a flag of truce, of the national flag or of the military insignia and uniform of the enemy, as well as the distinctive badges of the Geneva Convention”

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For Further Information Please Contact Press Office at +972 2 240 6515/6/7
E-mail: pressoffice@palestinercs.org

Daily update of Israeli violations since the latest wave of incrsions into Palestinian areas on March 29th, 2002.

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