The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) last week published a report (.pdf) examining the humanitarian impact of Israel’s “security fence” on 67 Palestinian communities in the northern West Bank, representing a combined population of nearly 220,000 Palestinians. 15 of the communities surveyed, with a total population of 10,000, are located west of the wall, confined in a “closed area” between the barrier and the Green Line.
The wall, declared “illegal” by the International Court of Justice in July 2004 and described by the OCHA as a “de facto border”, follows a route more than twice the length of the Green Line, 80% of which cuts through Palestinian land. When completed, it will annex to Israel roughly 8.6% of the West Bank, including “some of the most agriculturally productive land and richest water resources in the West Bank”, and trap approximately 60,000 Palestinians west of the barrier.
Many Palestinians living in communities east of the wall have been separated from their farms, which lie on the other side of the barrier. To access them, they must apply for Israeli permission, in the form of a perversely named “visitor’s permit”, to cross through one of the designated gates in the wall. The OCHA counted 67 such gates in the 200km section of the wall it surveyed. However, only 19 of these gates are open on a daily basis – a further 19 are open on a weekly/seasonal basis and 29 never allow Palestinians access to the closed area at all. Even those gates that do allow some degree of Palestinian access are subject to additional restrictions:
“Gates can be closed without warning on Saturdays, for major Israeli holidays, and for security reasons. There are also restrictions on vehicles and materials crossing through the gates, affecting tractors and cars; agricultural equipment and materials; construction materials; pack animals such as donkeys and horses; and livestock.
Ten communities are not allowed to take agricultural vehicles through the gates and 31 are prohibited from taking private vehicles across. The irregular pacing of crossing points means that farmers and labourers have to travel greater distances on the east side of the Barrier to reach designated gates. In addition, once through the gates, movement is also impeded and delayed by the Barrier’s severing of traditional agricultural roads, particularly as an individual’s land may be located a long distance from the gate over difficult terrain. In all, 57 of the communities surveyed reported that such traditional roads have been cut in their communities.”
The OCHA found that the eligibility requirements set by Israel for approving Palestinian applications for “visitor’s permits” have become “increasingly stringent”, with the result that “[o]nly 18% of the approximately 30,000 people who used to work land in the closed area before completion of the Barrier receive `visitor’ permits today”. Furthermore,
“[a]pproximately 3,000 people have stopped applying for permits, discouraged because of repeated refusal. Permits are not always issued to the most appropriate family member and the survey revealed that approximately 1,800 families do not have an able-bodied member with a permit.”
The impact of this enforced separation of farmers from their fields is particularly severe, given that the “majority” of the affected communities are “rural and highly dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods”.
The situation for those stuck on the “Israeli” side of the wall is even worse. In 14 of the 15 communities trapped between Israel and the barrier, Palestinians over 16 are required to obtain “permanent resident” permits from Israel. According to community officials, dozens of residents have not been provided with one, and thus risk being blocked from returning to their homes every time they leave the enclave to visit the 
rest of the West Bank.
The communities in the “closed area” rely on services located on the other side of the wall, with the result that many Palestinians have been isolated from schools, workplaces and health facilities. The OCHA found that seven communities east of the barrier have “no access to local primary health care”, with only one community enjoying “access to 24-hour-emergency healthcare.” Restricted gate openings have resulted in medical emergencies in seven communities – the situation is so bad that “expectant mothers leave the closed area weeks before delivery to ensure access to proper care.”
The wall has also had a profound social impact, “severing…social relations” between Palestinians living on different sides of the barrier. All 15 closed area communities reported that “proposed marriages have been prevented or married couples separated because of the Barrier and attendant permit regime.”
What makes this situation particularly galling is the fact that the route of the wall, the cause of so much humanitarian suffering, has been plainly drawn for the sole purpose of annexing to Israel the major settlement blocs, all of which are illegal under international law. As the OCHA noted in a previous report (linked below), “[t]he Barrier route is largely determined by the location of settlements”. Or, as veteran Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar and Israeli historian Idith Zertal put it somewhat less delicately in their recent history of the settlement enterprise, the wall is being “constructed with no reckoning and no logic other than the purpose of enclosing as many settlements as possible on the western, Israeli, side and dividing up and seizing Palestinian lands.”
As well as the inherent humiliation of having to depend upon the arbitrary approval of a foreign occupier to exercise rights as basic as freedom of movement, a majority of the communities surveyed also reported suffering additional abuse at the gates, ranging from “verbal abuse” and “regular harassment” to “physical violence” and “destruction of produce”. Perhaps this is the kind of thing they mean:
“With every Arab I see, I see Hani [Hani Abramov, a female Border Police officer killed by Palestinians during a military operation in October 2001] in my mind. In one shift, there were as many as 70 or 80 people whom I delayed. I stood them in a line and decided that they would stay with me for the whole 12- to 14-hour shift, in the sun, in the heat. I made them stand there with me and had them do all kinds of exercises. I stood them in threes, as if they were my soldiers. I started shouting at them and asked them `Why did you do that to Hani? What did she do to deserve it?’ No one else was around except my fighters, and they accepted this; it didn’t seem strange to them.”
One night Abramov was sitting alone in an armored vehicle and saw an Arab staring at her. “I stared right back and he started making obscene gestures. I took a good look at him. I wanted to remember what he was wearing and how he looked. And I can still remember: He was wearing three-quarter-length red pants, a white shirt and short black hair. As soon as he saw that my soldiers were coming back, he ran away. As soon as they got in the vehicle, I was ready to go. I drove really fast. When we found and caught him he realized who I was and what was happening. We took him to one of the alleyways and I started screaming at him. I made him look me in the eye and repeat in words what he’d done, and he of course tried to ignore me. He kept his eyes down. We stripped him until he was only in his underwear and just abused him.” (testimony of Libi Abramov, who served as Border Police officer at an IDF checkpoint).
In all, the conditions described above have convinced many Palestinians that they have no choice but to leave:
“Some 29 communities reported that households have left because of the Barrier, representing about 1,200 households, or three percent of the population surveyed. As reported by respondents in 36 communities, heads of households have also left to seek employment elsewhere in the West Bank, representing about 1,100 additional individuals.”
Expect to see more of this ethnic cleansing in the future. Unless Israel is forced dismantle the wall and withdraw to the Green Line – in short, to comply with the law – the future for those Palestinians living near the barrier, on either side, looks very grim indeed.
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For a detailed study of the effects of the wall as a whole on Palestinians in the West Bank, see this July 2007 OCHA report (.pdf). It reached similar conclusions to the report above:
- Palestinians from the West Bank require permits to visit the six specialist hospitals inside Jerusalem. The time and difficulty this entails has resulted in an up to 50% drop in the number of patients visiting these hospitals.
- Entire families have been divided by the Barrier. Husbands and wives are separated from each other, their children and other relatives.
- Palestinian Muslims and Christians can no longer freely visit religious sites in Jerusalem. Permits are needed and are increasingly difficult to obtain.
- School and university students struggle each day through checkpoints to reach institutions that are located on the other side of the Barrier.
- Entire communities, such as the 15,000 people in the villages of the Bir Nabala enclave, are totally surrounded by the Barrier. Movement in and out is through a tunnel to Ramallah which passes under a motorway restricted for Israeli vehicles only.
It also made the important point that, along with its significant humanitarian implications, the completion of the wall along the current route would also rule out any chance for a two-state settlement, since it would effectively sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.
Cross-posted at The Heathlander