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israeli occupation
West Bank Pogrom 'Underscores Urgent Need to Dismantle Apartheid': Amnesty
"The appalling spike in settler violence against Palestinians in recent days is part of a decadeslong state-backed campaign to dispossess, displace, and oppress Palestinians in the occupied West Bank," said one Amnesty official.
Apr 22, 2024
Amnesty International said Monday that the ongoing surge in deadly violence by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank "underscores [the] urgent need to dismantle apartheid" in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
For more than a week now, Israeli settlers have been attacking West Bank Palestinians in towns and villages including Al-Mughayir, Duma, Deir Dibwan, Beitin, and Aqraba, killing at least four people including a child; wounding dozens of others; and destroying homes, vehicles, and other property.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops have either stood and watched or participated in the settler attacks, which the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem and others are calling a "pogrom."
Amnesty said the "alarming spike in violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians across the occupied West Bank in recent days highlights the urgent need to dismantle illegal settlements, end Israel's occupation of the occupied Palestinian territories, and its longstanding system of apartheid.
"The appalling spike in settler violence against Palestinians in recent days is part of a decadeslong state-backed campaign to dispossess, displace, and oppress Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, under Israel's system of apartheid," Amnesty Middle East and North Africa regional director Heba Morayef said. "Israeli forces have a track record of enabling settler violence and it is outrageous that once again Israeli forces stood by and in some cases took part in these brutal attacks."
"Establishing Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories flagrantly violates international law and constitutes a war crime," Morayef added. "Violence is integral to the establishment and expansion of these settlements and to sustaining apartheid. It's time for the world to recognize this and pressure Israeli authorities to abide by international law by immediately halting settlement expansion and removing all existing settlements."
The latest wave of settler violence was sparked by the disappearance of Binyamin Achimair, a 14-year-old Israeli from the illegal settler outpost of Mal'achei Hashalom who went missing on April 12 while herding sheep near the village of Al-Mughayir east of Ramallah. As Israelis searched for Achimair, settlers began attacking Al-Mughayir's residents and property.
Achimair's body was found the following day. Israeli officials said he was killed in a "terrorist attack." However, no Palestinian resistance group has claimed responsibility for the incident. A 21-year-old Palestinian man was arrested Monday in alleged connection with the boy's death.
Late Friday, IDF troops and armored vehicles surrounded the Nur Shams refugee camp east of Tulkarem and besieged the community of more than 6,000 Palestinians during a 50-hour raid in which residents were shot, homes were destroyed, and scores of people were arrested.
By Saturday, IDF soldiers had killed 14 people in the camp, including at least one child. More than 40 other Palestinians were wounded.
"I saw one of my relatives, Jihad Zandiq, put his hands in the air to the soldiers but then they shot him anyway from point-blank range and killed him. Half of his skull exploded," eyewitness Mahmoud Qazmouz toldMiddle East Eye on Sunday.
Palestinian officials said Israeli troops attacked first responders attempting to rescue victims, including a volunteer paramedic who was shot in the leg.
Meanwhile, a funeral was held Sunday for Mohammed Awad Allah Musa, a 50-year-old Palestinian Red Crescent Society volunteer paramedic who was shot dead Saturday by Israeli settler-colonists while trying to reach Palestinians wounded by rampaging settlers in the town of Sa'wiyah south of Nablus.
The Nur Shams raid and ongoing settler attacks came as the U.S. State Department on Friday announced new sanctions targeting far-right Israeli settler leaders including Ben Zion Gopstein, the founder and head of the Jewish supremacist group Lehava.
The Biden administration—which backs Israel with billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic support—is also reportedly considering imposing sanctions on the IDF's Netzah Yehuda battalion over war crimes committed in the West Bank before the current Israeli war on Gaza, including the January 2022 death of Omar Assad, a 78-year-old Palestinian American man.
Responding to the prospect of the first-ever U.S. sanctions on his country's military, far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that "I will fight it with all my strength."
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, at least 485 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank since October 7, when Gaza-based militants attacked Israel. More than 1,100 people were killed in the attack—some by responding Israeli forces—and over 240 Israelis and others were kidnapped by Hamas and other militants.
Israel's 199-day retaliatory assault on Gaza—which critics including Israelis have called genocidal—has killed at least 34,151 Palestinians, mostly women and children, while wounding over 77,000 others, according to Palestinian and international officials. At least 11,000 Gazans are missing, presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of the hundreds of thousands of homes and other buildings that have been destroyed or damaged by Israeli bombardment. Around 90% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced, and Israel's continued obstruction of humanitarian aid delivery has fueled a burgeoning famine in which dozens of people, mostly children, have perished.
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'Every Year It Is More Relevant': Palestinians Mark Land Day Amid Genocide
"We honor those who rose up in 1976 and all who have risen up to fight for justice in Palestine," said one advocacy group.
Mar 30, 2024
This is a developing story... Please check back for possible updates...
Palestinians on Saturday were joined by people across the globe in marking Land Day, the 48th anniversary of Israel's killing of six unarmed protesters who rose up against the Israeli government's confiscation and occupation of Palestinian land.
Thousands of Palestinian people marched through Deir Hanna, one of the Israeli towns where authorities violently cracked down on nonviolent protesters on March 30, 1976, as they honored Raja Abu Raya, Khader Khalayleh, Khadija Shawahneh, Kheir Yassin, Mohsin Taha, and Raafat Zuhairi.
More than 100 people were also injured by Israeli authorities during the protest in 1976, which was organized in opposition to Israel's confiscation of nearly 5,000 acres of land that belonged to Palestinian citizens of Israel in the northern Galilee region.
The Good Shepherd Collective, an anti-Zionist human rights group based in the West Bank, said that with Israel bombarding Gaza and conducting raids almost daily in the West Bank as officials seize more land, Land Day becomes "more relevant" every year.
"No Palestinian needs to be reminded of the centrality of the land in the struggle for justice and liberation. Land Day is more a remembrance of one massacre among hundreds over more than one hundred years of Zionist violence," said Good Shepherd Collective. "In the midst of a genocide, we must continue to speak out and speak of the context of settler-colonialism's baked-in logic of elimination."
Last week, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrichannounced Israel was seizing nearly 2,000 acres of land in the occupied West Bank, which would allow the country to build more illegal settlements. The country's settlement-planning authority said earlier this month it had approved the construction of 3,500 new housing units in the territory.
As the Middle East Eyereported, Israeli forces conducted overnight raids across the West Bank ahead of Land Day, killing a 13-year-old boy named Nabil Abu Abed near Jenin.
The U.S.-based Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) marked Land Day as organizers with the group held solidarity marches and rallies in cities including Boston; Portland, Maine; and Providence, Rhode Island. Other groups organized a march scheduled for Saturday evening in New York City.
The group noted that Land Day also marks the beginning of the Great March of Return protests, which were held weekly for 21 months starting on March 30, 2018 as demonstrators demanded an end to Israel's blockade of Gaza and the right to return to the homes their families were expelled from in 1948 when Zionist forces cleared the way to establish Israel. More than 200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces for participating in the marches, including 46 children.
"We mourn the thousands whom the Israeli military murdered or permanently injured over the years. We honor those who rose up in 1976 and all who have risen up to fight for justice in Palestine," said JVP.
Marches also took place in Cardiff, Wales; London; Madrid; and Helsingborg, Sweden, with protesters reiterating the demand for an immediate, permanent cease-fire in Gaza.
"I'll keep [marching] as long as the bombing and the apartheid and the injustice is going on," Stephen Kapos, an 86-year-old survivor of the Holocaust, told Al Jazeera.
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US, UK, Fiji, and Hungary Only Nations to Defend Israeli Occupation at ICJ
One analyst argued that opponents of Israel's occupation "demolished" the arguments of its few supporters.
Feb 27, 2024
In what one policy expert said was a "stunning" display of Israel and its allies' isolation on the world stage, six days of International Court of Justice hearings on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories wrapped up on Monday with just four countries defending Israel's practices in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem over the past 57 years.
The United States—the world's biggest funder of Israel's government and military—was joined by the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Fiji in speaking in favor of Israel's illegal occupation, while 45 countries and three organizations testified against the Israeli government.
The hearings took place against the backdrop of Israel's relentless bombardment of Gaza, which has killed at least 29,878 Palestinians, and an announcement by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich that the country plans to build 3,300 new homes in settlements in the West Bank.
While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week that the settlement expansion is "inconsistent with international law," reversing a Trump-era policy, human rights attorney Noura Erakat noted that in the ICJ hearing, the U.S. "framed compliance with international law as an impediment to [the] political process."
Richard Visek, the State Department's acting legal adviser, invoked the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7 as he argued before the court that it "should not find that Israel is legally obligated to immediately and unconditionally withdraw from occupied territory."
"Any movement towards Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza requires consideration of Israel's very real security needs," said Visek. "We were all reminded of those security needs on October 7, and they persist."
But the vast majority of states present for the hearings rebuked Visek's claim, with Turkey's deputy minister of foreign affairs, Ahmet Yildiz, arguing that "the real obstacle to peace is obvious—the deepening occupation by Israel of the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, and failure to implement the two-state vision, Israel and Palestine living side by side."
Representing the African Union, Ohio State University law professor Mohamed Helal provided the court with an overview of the Palestinian territories' history of occupation to answer the question, "Does Israel have title over the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem?"
"The answer is unequivocally no," said Helal. "Since 1967, Israel has exercised belligerent occupation over the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The African Union also submits that Israel's 57-year occupation of the Palestinian territories is unlawful and must be brought to an end."
Legal experts including Helal spent six days testifying on the occupation Israel has maintained over the territories since the Six-Day War in 1967, including its construction of settlements inhabited by 700,000 settlers in the West Bank, its annexation of East Jerusalem, its blockade of goods in Gaza, and its restriction of Palestinians' movement.
Speaking for the League of Arab States on the closing day of the hearings on Monday, international law expert Ralph Wilde of University College London delivered what observers called "a legal masterpiece," explaining to the ICJ the illegality of Israel's occupation.
According to Israel and its allies, said Wilde, the desire for Israel to protect its security "somehow supersedes the rules of international law determining whether the occupation is existentially lawful. Instead, we have a new rule justifying the occupation until there is a peace agreement meeting Israeli security needs."
"This is the law as these states would like it to be, not not the law as it is," he continued, saying the occupation has no basis in U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which called on Israel to withdraw its troops from the occupied territories in 1967, or the 1993 Oslo Accords.
"Actually," he told the court, "you are being invited to do away with the very operation of some of the fundamental... laws of international law itself."
Al Jazeera political analyst Marwan Bishara said the evidence presented by opponents of the occupation "demolished British and American arguments" in the hearings.
"I'm going to say something I will regret, but I'll say it anyway—I feel sorry for the United States and the United Kingdom," said Bishara after watching the proceedings. In the first days of the hearing, he said, "it was clear to someone like me, a student of this issue, that the Americans and the British wanted to sound clever... That they were disingenuous and selective, and rather, to my mind, illogical."
The U.S. and U.K. led Israel's supporters at the hearing in falsely claiming that the conflict in Israel and Palestine is merely a "dispute," said Bishara, that should be left up to the two sides, despite the fact that the two countries provide Israel with aid.
"This is an aggression," he said. "As the African Union, as the Arab League, as well as the Islamic conference have argued, this has been going on for 75 years. There is a process, there is a pattern by Israel to annex, to occupy, to settle, and to take over Palestinian territory, denying the Palestinians the right of self-determination."
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