Human rights violations against Palestinians by Israel
[5][6] Israel's military campaigns in the Gaza Strip include Operation Cast Lead which was described by the UN Fact Finding Mission as a "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.
After the foundation of Israel in 1948, its first president Chaim Weizmann and South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts supported each other's view on the racial basis of their respective states and their rights over indigenous lands.
[57] During house raids, windows and doors were smashed, food stocks mashed up into an indistinct mush; grain stores, TVs, solar panels, water tanks and radios destroyed or impounded.
Families composed of a Jerusalemite spouse and a Palestinian from the West Bank (or Gaza) face enormous legal difficulties in attempts to live together, with most applications, subject to an intricate, on average decade-long, four-stage processing, rejected.
The 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Provision), or CEIL, subsequently renewed in 2016 imposed a ban on family unification between Israeli citizens or "permanent residents" and their spouses who are originally of the West Bank or Gaza.
In its decision regarding the practice, the Israeli Supreme Court in 2006 refrained from either endorsing or banning the tactic, but set forth four conditions – precaution, military necessity, follow-up investigation and proportionality[i] – and stipulated that the legality must be adjudicated on a case-by-case analysis of the circumstances.
[73] One intelligence officer recounting the atmosphere in the operations room where assassinations were programmed and then witnessed on video, stated that worries about "collateral damage" never dampened the cheers greeting a successful targeting mission.
[75] The entire Palestinian population is kept under surveillance, regardless of intelligence concerns, using smartphones and closed-circuit cameras, some capable of seeing into homes, whose photos are then fed into the IDF's "Blue Wolf" tracking system, endowed with facial recognition technology.
This is a pared down version of Wolf Pack, a computer data base containing "profiles of virtually every Palestinian in the West Bank, including photographs of individuals, their family histories, education and a security rating for each person."
"[81] Ben Ehrenreich, citing Gudrun Krämer's description of the British military suppression of the 1936 Palestinian Revolt, states that, aside from caning, all of the extreme measures adopted by the Mandatory authorities recur as standard practices in the way Israel manages the occupied territories.
[n] Fathers were most frequently affected in the early days: sundering families, the practice was arrest household heads at night in their homes and take them to a desert south of the Dead Sea where they were forced, at gunpoint or gunshot, to cross over into Jordan.
[95] The forced transfer of Palestinians still takes place in the West Bank: in 2018 the Israeli Supreme Court gave the green light to expel the people of Khan al-Ahmar from their township to a rubbish dump outside Abu Dis.
[116] Israel's use of collective punishment measures, such as movement restrictions, shelling of residential areas, mass arrests, and the destruction of public health infrastructure,[p] violates Articles 33 and 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
[119] In 2016 Amnesty International stated that the various measures taken in the commercial and cultural heart of Hebron over 20 years of collective punishment have made life so difficult for Palestinians[s] that thousands of businesses and residents have been forcibly displaced, enabling Jewish settlers to take over more properties.
[131] Zygmunt Bauman's warnings of the debilitating effect bureaucracy may have on the human condition has been cited to throw light on the Orwellian or Kafkaesque trap of red tape that, it is argued, places a stranglehold on Palestinian autonomy.
[141] Many personal effects – photos of children or families, watches, medals, football trophies, books, Qur'ans, jewelry – are taken and stored away, and, according to one informant, intelligence officer trainees were allowed to take items of such Palestinian "memorabilia", called "booty," from storerooms.
[74] After international protests, in February 2014 a pilot scheme was begun to issue summonses instead of arresting children at night, and programmed to last until December 2015[142] The purpose of mapping raids is, reportedly, to work out how an area looks from Palestinian angles for future planning to enable an option for "straw widows" operations (mounting ambushes from inside those homes).
[146] An extrapolation from this figure would, according to the NGO WCLAC, suggest that from the time martial law was imposed in June 1967 up to 2015, over 65,000 night raids had been conducted by the Israeli military on Palestinian homes in the West Bank (not including East Jerusalem).
[154] Taisir al-Arouri, a Bir Zeit University professor of mathematics, was arrested at night on 21 April 1974 and released on 18 January 1978, after suffering 45 months of imprisonment without trial or charges being laid, only after Amnesty International issued a public protest.
[156] In 2017 Amnesty International, noted that "hundreds of Palestinians, including children, civil society leaders and NGO workers were regularly under administrative detention",[157] and regards some, such as Khalida Jarrar and Ahmad Qatamesh, as prisoners of conscience.
[179] The First Intifada saw exceptionally high involvement by Palestinian teenagers, prompting Israel to declare stone throwing a felony under occupation law, a categorization that applied to children as well as adults and allowed for protracted incarceration of minors.
[197] Just after the occupation, a trial study carried out on Deir Dibwan's land, which is rich in underground water, concluded that it showed great promise as one of the best sites in the West Bank for growing oranges and bananas.
[206] Following an Ottoman practice of uprooting olive trees to punish tax evasion, Israel began destroying groves, but with the expressed purpose of increasing security for settlements, and visibility for its internal West Bank road system servicing the colonial infrastructure.
[207][ad] Aside from state practices, settlers have waged what one scholar terms "tree warfare" consisting in the stealing, uprooting, chopping or burning of native Palestinian olive groves, often as part of price tag operations.
[219] Israel, it is argued, has used the West Bank as a "sacrifice" zone by placing 15 waste treatment plants there under less stringent rules than those required in the Israeli legal system, thereby exposing the local people and environment to hazardous materials.
[221] The landfill near Al-Jiftlik in the Jericho Governorate, built on absentee Palestinian property without planning or an environmental impact analysis, is for the exclusive use 1,000 tons per day of waste produced by Israeli settlements and cities within Israel.
[af] The Paris Protocol undersigned in 1994 allowed Israel to collect VAT on all Palestinian imports and good from that country or in transit through its ports, with the system of clearance revenue giving it effective control over roughly 75% of PA income.
[237] In the aftermath of the Second Intifada, the budgetary allocations for Israel's social security net were reduced drastically: between 2001 and 2005 as defense outlays ratcheted up, child allowances were cut by 45%, unemployment compensation by 47%, and income maintenance by 25%.
[269][270] The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported that female detainees were photographed in "degrading circumstances" by Israeli troops, with these images subsequently being uploaded online.
[269][270] On 19 February 2024, a group of United Nations special rapporteurs released a report stating, "Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers.
