Israel appropriates 82% of Palestinian water

A Palestinian water expert has criticised the 1993 Oslo Peace Agreement signed between the Palestinians and the Israelis for giving Israel the right to control Palestinian water.

The Director of the Association of Palestinian Hydrologists, Abur-Rahman Al-Tamimi, said: "The Oslo Agreements gave control over basic water resources to the Israelis. The role of the Palestinian side was limited to serving it."

During a discussion panel in Ramallah, Al-Tamimi said: "The problem emerged when the Palestinians agreed to postpone the issue of water to final status negotiations. They did not even discuss the issue of irrigation water." He said the Israelis steal about 82 per cent of Palestinian water.

Al-Tamimi severely criticised the "Palestinian negotiators who ignored the rights of the Palestinians regarding water."

At the same time, he said: "The agreements laid down the right of the Israelis to the water of the River Jordan. It also laid down their rights to veto against any future talks regarding it."

The Palestinian expert also added: "The agreements included the rights of the Israeli to control all Palestinian water wells."

Regarding the future of Palestinian water, Al-Tamimi said: "As the Israelis completely control Palestinian water resources, future conflict in the region will be over water resources." More

 

Gaza Under Attack: Israeli Military Assassinates Hamas Leader in First Salvo of Bombing Campaign

The Israeli military launched a campaign of air strikes against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip November 14 by assassinating the head of the Palestinian group’s armed wing.

Ahmed Al-Jabari, the head of Hamas’ Qassam military brigades, was killed when an Israeli jet dropped a bomb on a car he was traveling in along with another man, whose name is not yet known.

The Israel Defense Forces announced that the assassination was the beginning of “Operation Pillar of Defense,” a campaign targeting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another armed group in Gaza.

The New York Times reports [3] that Al-Jabari was “the most senior official of the group to be killed by the Israelis since their invasion of Gaza four years ago.”

After the assassination, the Israeli Air Force continued to pound the Gaza Strip with air strikes, leading to the deaths of more people, including a one-year-old baby, according to a French photographer [4] on the ground there. Gaza is home to 1.5 million civilians, half of whom are children. The Strip has endured a devastating air, land and sea blockade from Israel ever since Hamas came to power after winning elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006.

Israel has long used extrajudicial assassinations as a favored tool against Palestinian armed groups.

“Israel's latest bombing campaign in Gaza, and in particular its assassination of Palestinian leaders, highlights once again that Israel views itself as above the law,” said Diana Buttu, a former advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization, in a statement. “This is precisely why the international community, and in particular the United States, must hold Israel accountable for its provocative and illegal actions, in order to stop another bloodbath in Gaza before it happens. It is time for the world to send Israel the message that it is not above the law and the Palestinians are not beneath it.”

In response to the killing of Al-Jabari, Hamas promised to make Israel “pay a high price.” Rockets fired from Palestinian armed groups have already been shot into Israel in response, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz. And like clockwork, the U.S. military has come out in support of Israel’s campaign. “We're monitoring the situation closely. We stand by our Israeli partners in their right to defend themselves against terrorism,” said a Pentagon spokesperson. [5] More

It is beyond the time that the international community stood with Palestine and Gaza against Israeli terrorism and theft of the majority of the Palestinain's territory. Editor

 

The new expropriation regime in the West Bank

Week 2362 of Occupation

Israel’s takeover of West Bank lands for settlement construction has proceeded without interruption since 1967. But the legal strategies for carrying out land acquisition and legitimating it in the eyes of the Israeli public and the international community have evolved over the 45 years. There are now signs that the regime of expropriation is once again changing its shape, this time making even fewer concessions to international law and opinion.

Since the beginning of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Israeli courts have allowed the army to expropriate private Palestinian-owned land. International law allows for the occupier’s use of land in cases of “military necessity,” and Israel’s High Court of Justice gave “military necessity” an extremely liberal interpretation, in effect allowing seizure of land whenever the military authorities claimed that it would benefit the security of the state.

Thus many of the early settlements were established on private land seized by the army and legitimated by the court. That was until 1979, when the High Court of Justice, in the face of a flagrant mockery of the spirit of international law, ruled that the military could not confiscate land for the sole purpose, with no security rationale, of establishing a permanent settlement. The extreme religious settlement of Elon Moreh was forced to relocate, and the era of military pretexts for the theft of private land for settlements was brought to a close.

But of course the Elon Moreh decision did not slow the acquisition of Palestinian land for the illegal settlement enterprise. It led to two new techniques. The first involved the spurious legal distinction between private Palestinian lands, and “state lands” to which no one held legal title. The court declared that private land could not be used for settlements (although military requisition was still approved), but state lands were fair game. Thus the courts created a legal avenue for the theft of lands, some of which had been cultivated for many generations, and all of which constitute the only territory left for the future Palestinian state.

The other consequence of the landmark Elon Moreh decision was the practice of seizing hilltops and claiming unauthorized but unofficially-sanctioned outposts. The networks of religious settler activists, and well placed bureaucrats in the ministries of defense and housing continued to spread across the central spine of the West Bank, oblivious to whom the land’s legal owners might be. The Elon Moreh ruling was bypassed as settlers grabbed hilltops, while government agencies quickly connected them to the electric grid, water services, and road network.

Now this thirty-year-old regime of land acquisition, with its dual offensives of legal procedure for so-called “state lands,” and after-the-fact normalization of illegal “outposts,” might be undergoing another transformation. Recent years have placed some obstacles in the path of the settler movements, from the work of Peace Now, to Dalia Sasson’s government-sponsored expose of the deeply rooted corruption that enables the illegal settlements. And most recently, in July of this year, a government-appointed commission headed by retired jurist Edmond Levy called for an end to the two-faced policy of unofficially promoting outposts while officially placing them outside the law. The Levy commission called for the immediate legalization of the outposts, even preserving those built on private Palestinian land, perhaps compensating the owners. More