"The widely held assumption that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is a temporary situation and that the 'peace process' will soon bring an end to Israeli abuses has obscured the reality on the ground today of Israel's entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians. A single authority, the Israeli government, rules primarily over the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), made-up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Drawing on years of human rights documentation, case studies and a review of government planning documents, statements by officials and other sources, [this report] examines Israel's treatment of Palestinians and evaluates whether particular Israeli policies and practices in certain areas amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution."--Page 4 of cover.
"This report documents how settlement businesses facilitate the growth and operations of settlements. These businesses depend on and contribute to the Israeli authorities' unlawful confiscation of Palestinian land and other resources. They also benefit from these violations, as well as Israel's discriminatory policies that provide privileges to settlements at the expense of Palestinians, such as access to land and water, government subsidies, and permits for developing land"--Publisher's description.
This report show, most of the destruction in Rafah occurred along the Israel-controlled border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. During regular nighttime raids and with little or no warning, Israel forces used armored caterpillar D9 bulldozers to raze blocks of homes at the edge of the camp, incrementally expanding a "buffer zone" that is currently up to three hundred meters wide. The pattern of destruction strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat, in violation of international law. In most cases Human Rights Watch found the destruction carried out in the absence of military necessity.
"Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are widely viewed as illegal under international humanitarian law, which prohibits the occupying power from transferring its civilian population into the territories it occupies. This report focuses on the less-discussed aspect of Israeli laws and policies in the West Bank that discriminate against the Palestinian population in favor of settlers. Based on case studies that compare Israeli settlements with next-door Palestinian communities in six areas of the West Bank, this report shows that Israel operates a two-tier system for the two populations in areas under its exclusive control--'Area C' and East Jerusalem; it provides preferential services, development and benefits for Jewish settlers, while imposing harsh conditions on Palestinians. The report highlights Israeli practices the only discernible purposes of which appear to be promoting life in the settlements while in many instances stifling growth in Palestinian communities and even forcibly displacing Palestinian residents. Israeli policies control many aspects of the day-to-day life of Palestinians who live in Area C and East Jerusalem. Those policies often have no conceivable security justification for the harms they cause--such as denying access to electricity, water and roads, rejecting building permit applications for houses, schools, clinics and infrastructure, and demolishing homes and even entire communities. By contrast, Israeli policies, such as substantial government financial incentives, promote Jewish settlements and encourage them to expand in 'Area C' of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, often using land and other resources that are effectively barred to Palestinians. In some cases, Israel's discriminatory policies have forcibly displaced Palestinians from the same areas where settlements have encroached. Such different treatment, on the basis of race, ethnicity and national origin and not narrowly tailored to meet genuine security or other legitimate goals, is not justifiable and therefore violates the fundamental prohibition against discrimination under human rights law. The report calls on Israel to cease its discriminatory practices immediately, quite apart from its independent legal obligation to cease its support for settlements and to remove settlers from the West Bank. The report also calls on other countries and businesses to avoid supporting Israeli settlement policies that are inherently discriminatory and violate international law."--P. [4] of cover.
"This report evaluates patterns of arrest and detention conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 25 years after the Oslo Accords granted Palestinians a degree of self-rule over these areas and more than a decade after Hamas seized effective control over the Gaza Strip. Human Rights Watch detailed more than two dozen cases of people detained for no clear reason beyond writing a critical article or Facebook post or belonging to the wrong student group or political movement."--Publisher website.
For seventy years Israel has existed as a state, and for forty years it has honored a peace treaty with Egypt that is widely viewed as a triumph of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. Yet the Palestinians - the would-be beneficiaries of a vision for a comprehensive regional settlement that led to the Camp David Accords in 1978 - remain stateless to this day. How and why Palestinian statelessness persists are the central questions of Seth Anziska's groundbreaking book, which explores the complex legacy of the agreement brokered by President Jimmy Carter. Based on newly declassified international sources, Preventing Palestine charts the emergence of the Middle East peace process, including the establishment of a separate track to deal with the issue of Palestine. At the very start of this process, Anziska argues, Egyptian-Israeli peace came at the expense of the sovereignty of the Palestinians, whose aspirations for a homeland alongside Israel faced crippling challenges. With the introduction of the idea of restrictive autonomy, Israeli settlement expansion, and Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the chances for Palestinian statehood narrowed even further. The first Intifada in 1987 and the end of the Cold War brought new opportunities for a Palestinian state, but many players, refusing to see Palestinians as a nation or a people, continued to steer international diplomacy away from their cause.
