Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian youth and wounded another on Wednesday after firebombs were thrown at their vehicle in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli military spokeswoman said. A Palestinian paramedic said Fayez Atta, 17, from a village near the West Bank town of Ramallah, had died of gunshot wounds and another youth had been taken to an Israeli hospital in a serious condition. The Israeli spokeswoman said troops opened fire when the Palestinians, whom they suspected had attacked their vehicle with firebombs, ignored their orders to surrender. Atta was the first Palestinian youth killed by Israel for about a month in the West Bank, territory captured by Israel in a 1967 war and now also controlled by Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Most of the recent Israeli-Palestinian violence has taken place along Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, where more than 1,300 Palestinians and 14 Israelis died in a 22-day Israeli offensive launched in December against Islamist Hamas militants. (Reporting by Ali Sawafta; writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; editing by Andrew Roche)
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By: Amira Hass
Date: 27/05/2013
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Slain Bedouin girls' mother, a victim of Israeli-Palestinian bureaucracy
Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords. The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them. In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B. The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians. Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories). In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long. The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.
By: Phoebe Greenwood
Date: 27/05/2013
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John Kerry unveils plan to boost Palestinian economy
John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector. The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace. Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago. Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid. Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority". Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations. "Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."
By: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
Date: 27/05/2013
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Isolation Devastates East Jerusalem Economy
Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops. “All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive. Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him. “I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.” Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay. “It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.” He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?” Illegal annexation Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community. Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect. “After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote. Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation. Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce. Extreme poverty Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower. While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line. “How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”. “Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked. “You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS. Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities. Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn. Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent. “Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found. Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population. To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones. It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services. “Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER). Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”
By the Same Author
Date: 14/03/2009
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Israeli Soldiers Kill Palestinian in West Bank
Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian youth and wounded another on Wednesday after firebombs were thrown at their vehicle in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli military spokeswoman said. A Palestinian paramedic said Fayez Atta, 17, from a village near the West Bank town of Ramallah, had died of gunshot wounds and another youth had been taken to an Israeli hospital in a serious condition. The Israeli spokeswoman said troops opened fire when the Palestinians, whom they suspected had attacked their vehicle with firebombs, ignored their orders to surrender. Atta was the first Palestinian youth killed by Israel for about a month in the West Bank, territory captured by Israel in a 1967 war and now also controlled by Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Most of the recent Israeli-Palestinian violence has taken place along Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, where more than 1,300 Palestinians and 14 Israelis died in a 22-day Israeli offensive launched in December against Islamist Hamas militants. (Reporting by Ali Sawafta; writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; editing by Andrew Roche)
Date: 05/02/2009
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Abbas Government Announces $600 Million Gaza Aid Project
The government of Western-back Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced on Wednesday a $600 million reconstruction program for the war-battered Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who heads Abbas's West Bank-based government, said the program would cover all Palestinian houses destroyed or damaged during Israel's 22-day military offensive in the Hamas-ruled enclave. The United States and its allies want credit for reconstruction to accrue to Abbas's Palestinian Authority, and not to the Iranian-backed Islamists who won a 2006 election and forcibly seized control of the Gaza Strip 18 months later. While Abbas's government would take the lead in planning the rebuilding, it has scant presence on the ground in the Gaza Strip, meaning reconstruction work would initially have to be done by U.N. agencies and contractors, Western diplomats said. "The amount of the project is $600 million. Most of it will come from donors," Fayyad said in a speech in the West Bank city of Ramallah. He said further details would be announced later. Fayyad said his government would contribute $50 million of its own money to the United Nations to assist Gazans. Egypt is to host an international conference on March 2 on Gaza reconstruction, in coordination with the Palestinian Authority. The cost of renewal is estimated at $2 billion. It is unclear how soon reconstruction will get under way, both because of Palestinian infighting and Israel's resistance to letting in building supplies. Hamas has announced its own plans to spearhead Gaza's post-war reconstruction and has promised to pay each family whose home was destroyed some $5,000. While Israel has opened Gaza's border crossings to larger amounts of food and medicine, it has so far balked at letting in glass, steel and cement. Israeli officials say these materials could be used by Hamas to build rockets, bunkers and tunnels. Israel has also prevented Abbas's government from transferring cash from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip to pay the tens of thousands of Palestinians on its payroll, casting doubt on Fayyad's ability to carry out any reconstruction there. Israeli defense official Peter Lerner said the Jewish state has agreed to allow the entry of 10 million Israeli shekels ($2.5 million) into the Gaza Strip, in exchange for the same amount of worn-out shekel banknotes. But Israel has refused to let in the 237 million shekels ($58 million) requested by Abbas's government to pay Gaza salaries, Palestinian and Western officials said. As a result, Fayyad said salary payments to Palestinian Authority employees would be delayed by two weeks. Fayyad put the Palestinian Authority's 2009 budget at $3.2 billion, up from $2.8 billion the year before, with almost half of it going to government salaries. He added that foreign aid for running costs would likely be less than the $1.76 billion received in 2008. (Additional reporting by Adam Entous, Writing by Adam Entous and Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem, Editing by Matthew Jones)
Date: 17/12/2008
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Palestinians Celebrate Release From Israeli Jails
Israel released 224 prisoners in a goodwill gesture to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday, prompting joyous family reunions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Families sang and danced as prison buses rolled up full of newly freed men, shouting and waving from the windows, and mothers wept as they embraced their children. Abbas greeted them individually with kisses on the cheeks at his office in Ramallah, the seat of his government, but said Israel should release all Palestinians it was holding. "Our happiness will not be complete until all of the 11,000 prisoners are freed," he said. "We promise you we will work to free all prisoners from all factions." The president said that pledge included members of the hardline Islamist group Hamas, which drove his Fatah faction out of the Gaza Strip last year and now controls the territory. Egyptian-mediated talks to try to heal the rift between Fatah and Hamas have made no visible progress in the past few months. "Today some of our brothers were released and sent back to their homes in the beloved Gaza Strip. We hope to God they were not freed from one prison only to enter another," Abbas added. CONFIDENCE BUILDING Israel aims to reward Fatah and bolster the popularity of Abbas, who is seeking peace with the Jewish state and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside it, while punishing Hamas as long as it clings to armed resistance and rejection of Israel. "We hope these releases will be seen as an important confidence-building measure designed to strengthen the trust and the confidence in the (peace) negotiations," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Israel had released about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners since last year, including 200 in August, Regev said. He did not say how many more had been arrested in the same period. He confirmed that no Hamas members were freed on Monday. Most came from the Ofer Prison in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. U.S.-sponsored peace talks between Olmert and Abbas, which are rejected by Hamas, have shown little sign of progress. A group of 18 were taken by bus from a prison in the southern Israeli town of Ashkelon into Gaza. "My happiness cannot be described. My happiness is like nothing else in the world. I cannot talk, I cannot talk," said the mother of Fatah member Mohammed Abdu, who served seven years of a 13-year sentence. Friends and relatives hoisted him on their shoulders as families embraced on the Gaza side of Israel's Erez checkpoint which controls access to the blockaded strip. They draped a black-and-white checked keffiya headdress over his shoulders. The Israelis "should not be discriminating" between Fatah and Hamas, Abdu's mother said. "They should all be released."
Date: 29/03/2008
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Fatah Says Hamas must Cede Gaza before Talks
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction on Wednesday ruled out talks with Hamas unless the Islamist group first cedes control of Gaza, casting doubt on a Yemen-sponsored reconciliation push. Fatah and Hamas, which seized control of the coastal enclave last June, agreed in Yemen this week to revive direct talks after months of hostilities to "return the Palestinian situation to what it was before the Gaza incidents." But an apparent dispute quickly broke out. Hamas has said talks will start on April 5 while Abbas's office insisted the Islamist group must first relinquish control of the Gaza Strip. "We are ready to open a new chapter but the Palestinian condition remains unchanged, and that is a complete and a total reversal of the coup," Abbas's media adviser Nabil Amr told reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "This is the final position of the Palestinian National Authority, of the Palestine Liberation Organization and of Fatah." After the Gaza takeover, Abbas sacked a Hamas-led unity government, arrested some supporters of the group and pursed U.S.-backed peace talks with Israel -- a move Hamas opposes. Hamas has repeatedly called for reconciliation talks with Fatah but has rejected Abbas's condition that it first give up control of the Gaza Strip, where 1.5 million Palestinians live. This week's dispute was certain to increase political tensions between the two groups and weaken hopes by ordinary Palestinians for a deal to end hostilities. About 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza and several hundred in the West Bank city of Hebron joined rallies for unity. In Hebron they waved Hamas, Fatah and Palestinian flags and held hands, while in Gaza crowds chanted "Yes for reconciliation". Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said Amr's comments on Wednesday effectively "wiped out" the Yemeni initiative and reflected the positions of Israel and the United States. Abu Zuhri said the "Yemeni initiative stated clearly it was an initiative for dialogue between Hamas and Fatah" and not a list of items that must be implemented immediately. But Azzam Al-Ahmad, a senior Fatah leader, who signed the Yemeni proposal with Hamas, said his group had rejected efforts by Hamas to change the plan. "We will sit down with Hamas after they end the coup and after they stop saying that there is a government headed by Haniyeh," he said, referring to Hamas's leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh.
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