Tag Archives: Amira Hass

High Court Justices Know Israel Won’t Face Sanctions Over Masafer Yatta Evictions

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The decision was released on the eve of Independence Day, when the Jews celebrate the founding of the State of Israel and Palestinians grieve for the loss of their homeland


Protesters against the evictions at the High Court building in Jerusalem, March. Credit: Emil Salman

Amira Hass, Haaretz, May 5 2022

Starting this morning, at any given moment, the Civil Administration, the Israel Defense Forces, the Border Police and the regular police are allowed to send dozens – and if they need to, even more – of soldiers and police officers into eight villages in Masafer Yatta and with their guns trained on them, put on trucks and buses hundreds of their residents – the elderly, the young, women and infants. And this will be done with a seal of approval from Israel’s High Court of Justice.

From today, subcontractors working for the Civil Administration, accompanied by civil servants and soldiers, are free to destroy not just an odd small hut or animal pen, but dozens of homes, including caves that were hewn out of rock to serve as residences long before the establishment of the State of Israel. All this is made possible under a decision by Justices David Mintz, Isaac Amit and Ofer Grosskopf to reject the petitions filed by the residents of Masafer Yatta against thir permanent displacement.

Starting this morning, at any given moment, the Civil Administration, the Israel Defense Forces, the Border Police and the regular police are allowed to send dozens – and if they need to, even more – of soldiers and police officers into eight villages in Masafer Yatta and with their guns trained on them, put on trucks and buses hundreds of their residents – the elderly, the young, women and infants. And this will be done with a seal of approval from Israel’s High Court of Justice.

From today, subcontractors working for the Civil Administration, accompanied by civil servants and soldiers, are free to destroy not just an odd small hut or animal pen, but dozens of homes, including caves that were hewn out of rock to serve as residences long before the establishment of the State of Israel. All this is made possible under a decision by Justices David Mintz, Isaac Amit and Ofer Grosskopf to reject the petitions filed by the residents of Masafer Yatta against thir permanent displacement.

The decision was released on the Supreme Court website on Memorial Day, the eve of Independence Day, when the Jews celebrate the founding of the State of Israel and Palestinians grieve for the loss of their homeland, their expulsion and being made refugees. The High Court justices couldn’t have timed any better the release of their ruling countenancing an expulsion and ending a way of life for these Palestinians – one that developed over more than 100 years and is characterized by family, economic, social and cultural interconnections and dependencies among the villages and between them and the nearest urban center. The destruction of eight of some 14 villages will destroy the historic and geographical fabric of life in the area.

In the historiographical debate about whether Israel is in its essence and character a colonial-settler entity, the justices have expressed a firm stance: Most certainly, it is. Because the essence of settler colonialism is the taking over of land by an immigrant population while expelling its indigenous (in the most extreme case by committing genocide), denying their linkage to the land and totally excluding them from the new political order that the immigrants have created. In this order, in which the indigenous population has no say or any rights, it’s natural for the new rulers to decide that a particular piece of land is needed for its army. Or maybe more settlers. Or maybe both. Masafer Yatta’s transformation into Firing Zone 918 is but another tier in a process that has been going on between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean for more than a century, and serves as an illustration of the continuity of Israeli policy.

The justices dismissed disparagingly the evidence provided by the residents – oral testimony, documents and physical evidence from the actual area – attesting to their connection to the place, past and present. And indeed, rejection of the historical and family memory of the indigenous population is an essential part of a settler-colonial political order, in which no consideration is given to its voice or past. The justices adopted with enthusiasm the position of the state, which held that the residents of Masafer Yatta had invaded the area only after the army declared it a training zone in 1980. In other words, according to the State Prosecutor’s Office and the High Court, a population of farmers and herders, who lead very simple lives, plotted in bad faith to prevent the area from being turned into a military training ground, choosing to live in a place without running water, electricity or paved access roads, without the right to build.

The justices chose to ignore the ways in which Palestinian villages and hamlets have sprung up and been created over the centuries. When the population grows and the number of sheep and goats multiplies, some of the residents of a village will move to other pastures and water sources, and gradually expand the lands they work, known and accepted to be their village’s. Caves might initially serve as homes and over time, as the population increases in those extensions, and as the needs change, more simple constructions are built – including public ones, such as schools and access roads. The original village becomes a town, or even a city.

After 1967, Israel acted determinedly to put a stop to these evolutionary processes in the West Bank. Declaring areas firing zones was one way to achieve this. Establishing settlements and the grab of more land and water resources was another. The High Court chose to feign ignorance and belittle the historical significance of a document submitted by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel: a recommendation by Ariel Sharon, when he was agriculture minister in 1981 and chairman of the ministerial settlements committee, that the army sought to expand the firing zone declared in Masafer Yatta in order to prevent “the spread of the rural Arabs of the mountain down the side of the mountain facing the desert … and to keep these area in our hands.”

The attorneys representing the villages – Shlomo Lecker and the lawyers for ACRI, Dan Yakir and Roni Pelli – relied on Article 49 of the Geneva Convention: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

The justices rejected the claims of the plaintiffs that the court must honor this clause. Justice Mintz even asserted that Section 49 applied by “agreement” and not by “custom” – in other words, that it was the result of an agreement between countries and not one that a court inside any one state must necessarily honor. Attorneys Michael Sfard and Netta Amar-Shiff (whose amicus curiae brief she filed at the behest of the Masafer Yatta community council, was rejected by the court) said on Thursday that Mintz’s arguments were unfounded; as Sfard said, “This is nothing less than an embarrassing basic legal error.”

The original petitions submitted by Lecker and ACRI attorneys in the year 2000 followed the mass eviction by the army in November 1999, including razing homes, pens, wells, and caves used as homes. These expulsions occurred when the prime minister and defense minister was Ehud Barak, a Labor Party man, and at a time when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were in negotiations in what the world then called a peace process. The dissonance between a “peace process” and mass eviction didn’t bother the Israeli society. .

The High Court, as usual, missed in the 2000s the opportunity to issue a principled decision against the evictions and to demand the state to act according to international law. It settled then for an interim injunction that allowed the residents to return but barred them from rebuilding the structures that were destroyed or building new housing to meet the needs of a growing population.

Meanwhile, the High Court generously allowed the state to repeatedly postpone submitting its response to the original petitions. During those years, the European Union made clear it opposed any form of forced displacement.. Concurrently, illegal settler outposts multiplied in the area, the land controlled by the settlers expanded, and so did the methods used by the Civil Administration and the settlers to deprive Palestinians of accessing their land.

Despite the fact that the mass expulsion and demolition of entire villages the High Court has now approved go against the stance of the EU and probably of some officials in the U.S. government, the High Court justices know very well that Israel isn’t in danger of being sanctioned over their decision. They also know that forced displacement of between 1,200 and 1,800 Palestinians from their homes does not diverge from any of the standards that now prevail in Israel.

What Happens to a Palestinian Who Protects His Land

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Home Invasions and False Arrests: Aref Jaber defies settlers’ attempts to take over his plot of land near Hebron, and finds himself facing harassment from the army too

Amira Hass, Haaretz, Aug. 28, 2021

On December 11, a structure made of wood and cinder blocks appeared on a piece of land belonging to Aref Jaber of Hebron. Just before he found the structure, relatives told him that Israeli Jews were squatting on his land, on a hill east of Hebron in the West Bank, in an area called al-Bak’aa.

Since that day, Jaber and his family have been constantly harassed: raids on his land and home, other illegal structures going up and being demolished, intrusive drones, imposter Israel Police officers saying they’re from the Shin Bet security service, and false arrests by the army and police.

From the plot at al-Bak’aa to the home in Hebron and all the way to the Ofer military court, Haaretz has been accompanying the Jaber family since March – and the challenges they’ve encountered because they object to a hostile takeover of their land.

The structure discovered on December 11 was demolished; almost immediately a drone appeared over the plot, followed by a military force and Israeli civilians. There were also police officers and vehicles of Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank.

“We told them that strangers had built something on our land; the policemen told us to file a complaint,” Jaber told Haaretz. Later that day, an Israeli settler who lives near him in Hebron’s Old City shouted at him: “Why did you destroy the structure, why did you destroy the structure?”

Jaber filed a complaint about illegal construction on his land as well as vandalism of his car. “From the distance, the children saw Israelis around the car,” Jaber said. The windshield and a headlight were smashed and one of the door handles was broken.

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The village where Palestinians are rendered completely powerless

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Help Harun Abu Aram Heal

Rebuilding Alliance is organizing this fundraiser and will be working with the family to meet their needs. They are a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that works to realize a just and enduring peace in Palestine and Israel founded upon equal rights, equal security, and equal opportunity for all.

Harun Abu Aram was shot and paralyzed by Israeli security forces on Friday in his village, where even having electricity is deemed illegal


Ashraf Amour and family members inside their home, in a cave in the village of Khirbet al-Rakiz, in the West Bank’s south Hebron Hills. (Emil Salman)

Amira Hass and Hagar Shezaf, Haaretz, January 5, 2021

"I blame myself for Harun’s injury,” said Ashraf Amour from the village of Khirbet al-Rakiz, near the cave where he and his family live in the West Bank’s south Hebron Hills.

“Ultimately, all that he did was come and help me when he saw soldiers confiscating my generator, and because of that, they shot him,” Amour said Sunday in describing the incident that left village resident Harun Abu Aram paralyzed from the neck down. 

'All that he did was come and help me when he saw soldiers confiscating my generator, and because of that, they shot him'

“It would have been easier for me if they had demolished my animal pen or my children’s swings or if Harun had been shot in the arm or the leg,” Amour said, not attempting to hold back his tears, “but the bullet hit his neck and came out the other side, hitting nerves. Now he’s lying in the hospital paralyzed.”

The incident near the town of Yatta occurred on Friday and the height of the confrontation was caught on video by one of Amour’s neighbors. The army issued a statement for this article saying that the incident is being investigated.


Ashraf Amour, left, and his son Mohammed stand next to the damaged generator in the village of Khirbet al-Rakiz in the West Bank’s south Hebron Hills. Credit: Emil Salman

Khirbet al-Rakiz is one of 12 villages in the Masafer Yatta region. In the 1980s, Israel declared about 30,000 dunams (7,500 acres) of it as a military firing zone. In 1999, the Israeli army expelled roughly 700 residents from the region and demolished many of their homes.

Petitions were filed to the High Court of Justice, which issued an interim order permitting them to return until a final verdict on the case was rendered, but they were not allowed to rebuild their homes. Efforts to settle the case failed, but any construction that the residents have undertaken, even of the simplest and most necessary kind, has been considered illegal.

The soldiers came to the village following a report from settlers that new construction was being carried out. That same morning, village residents said, a drone with a camera was hovering over Khirbet al-Rakiz. That wasn’t’ the first time. 

They said it belonged to settlers in the area. Some said that it belonged to the Regavim organization, which tracks new Palestinian construction activity in Area C– the 62% of the West Bank under full Israeli control – and which then reports the activity to Israeli authorities. 


Harun Abu Aram's parents at Khirbet al-Rakiz, January 2021. They lived in the cave for decades. Credit: Emil Salman

Around 1 P.M. on Friday, an army jeep arrived along with a car from the Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank driven by Husam Muadi, the infrastructure officer of the Hebron District Coordination and Liaison Office.

“I was sitting with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law at the entrance to the house in the cave when four soldiers and the district coordination and liaison officer arrived,” Amour told Haaretz. “They entered the house as if it was their own, without an order and without saying why. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, and the officer, who didn’t introduce himself, responded in Arabic, ‘Be quiet.’ We started to argue.

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#ObliteratedFamilies – Introduction by Amira Hass

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Rubble of the Maadi house

During the 2014 Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, 142 Palestinian families lost three or more members. Some of the families were wiped out entirely.

The #ObliteratedFamilies project tells the stories of some of these families, their loved ones who were killed and those left behind.

Behind every erased Gazan family is an Israeli pilot. Behind every orphaned child who has lost his brothers and sisters in the bombing is an Israeli commander who gave the order and a soldier who pulled the trigger. Behind every demolished house are the Israeli physicist and hi-tech specialist who calculated the optimal angles for maximal impact. And there is the army spokesperson (backed by legal experts) who always evaded the journalist’s question: how proportional is it to shell an entire building with all its inhabitants? What – in your laws – justifies killing 23 family members, babies, children and the elderly among them, in one fell swoop of a missile?

There is one very present absentee in the “stories” below: Israeli society. Whether those members of society directly responsible, from government ministers and general military staff down through the ranks, or those who are indirectly responsible in their support and refusal to know. Have the direct accomplices – most of whom preserve their armed anonymity – ever shown any interest in knowing who was targeted by their sophisticated smart bombs? Or how many unarmed civilians they killed, their names, how many girls and boys, how many members of a single family, how many entire families have been erased? Disastrously, the safe guess is that physical distance and the fact that both soldiers and commanders did not have to soil their hands with blood nor see the mangled bodies with their own eyes helped them greatly to bury any information, knowledge, and thought.

Before and between the major onslaughts of 2008-9, 2012 and 2014 “smaller-scale” Israeli assaults were carried out, and they too wiped out lives, or erased the toil of many years and added traumas onto past disasters. Another link in such a long chain of injustices that one’s head is dizzy with disbelief, or the need to forget. At times, Gazans themselves help one forget: with their humor, their warmth, the continuity of life and vitality their creativity which breaks through all barriers and limitations of the siege and the pain, their silences – for they are sick of telling, or because what’s the point. But more than ever, more than any previous large-scale or smaller-scale assault, after 2014, the quenched eyes of Gazans have recounted how that was the most horrific of attacks.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) calculated that 142 families lost three or more members, each of these families in a single Israeli shelling or bombing. The total was 742 persons, more than 25% of all Palestinian casualties of that summer. There is nothing more difficult than gathering testimonies from people whose families have been nearly wiped out, to try and describe the horrendous vacuum which has been created and cannot be filled. The choice of “only” ten families, is a statement: testimony gathering and reading must not become automatic. It mustn’t, lest feelings be dulled. Therefore, the silences and the spaces between the spoken and the unspoken, between the written and the unwritten, speak for all the rest.

The erasure of entire families was one of the appalling characteristics of the 2014 assault. These were no errors or mistaken personal choices on the part of a pilot or a navigator or a brigade commander. This was policy. There are no anonymous players here: the identity of the policy makers is well known, as are their names and positions. Between July 7 and August 26, Israel carried out about 6,000 air raids on the Gaza Strip and fired 14,500 tank shells and about 35,000 artillery shells. 2,251 Palestinians were killed, among them 1,462 civilians, 551 of whom were children, and 299 women. Some of the non-civilians killed – namely combatant members of the armed organizations – were not killed in battle but under the same civilian circumstances where their relatives were also killed: in their beds, in their own homes, during the fast-breaking meal, in their residential quarters.

As stated in B’Tselem’s report “Black Flag”, which investigated 70 of the 142 incidents, with the exception of a few cases Israel never gave any explanation for bombing or shelling those houses with their inhabitants inside. In other words, Israel never disclosed what and who were its targets: perhaps one of the family members, perhaps a weapons stash in the house or fire opened from a neighboring house? But the systematic action and the silence both show that Israel finds it ‘legitimate’ and ‘proportional’ to kill entire families: if one of their members is a Hamas fighter, if a weapons stash is held nearby or in their home, or for any other similar reason. What does it mean? That it is legitimate to shell nearly every home in Israel, for nearly every Israeli family has an armed soldier, and many homes are inhabited by senior army officials, and important military and security installations are situated in the heart of Israeli civilian population. This is an absurd and criminal criterion of warfare, opposed to international law and basic principles of justice. But the majority in Israeli society embraces it as right and justified.

According to OCHA, Hamas and other Palestinian armed organizations launched 4,881 rockets and fired 1,753 mortar shells against Israel. 94% of these reached the maximum range of 50 kilometers, mentions B’Tselem. This fire targeted mostly Israeli civilian communities. Because of the limited technology of Hamas’ weapons, and thanks to Israel’s state-of-the-art defense capacities and the evacuation of numerous Israeli residents, the number of Israeli civilian casualties was minimal: six Israeli civilians were killed, among them one 5-year old child. The 67 Israeli soldiers killed during the onslaught were casualties in battle. The Palestinian combatants who killed them were defending their own population from the invader.

The Gaza Strip is not a sovereign state, even if the Hamas regime sometimes behaves like a sovereign government of a liberated territory. According to international agreements, the Strip is an inseparable part of the Palestinian state which the world is still committed to creating, at least by declaration. It is still under Israeli occupation – even though the parameters of control differ from those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. For example, the population registry of Gaza, as that of the West Bank, is subordinate to the Israeli Ministry of Interior and its policies. Only upon Israeli approval is the Palestinian Authority able to issue new ID cards to 16-year-olds in the Gaza Strip every year, as in the West Bank. Thousands of Palestinians, among them refugees from Syria, live in the Gaza Strip without Palestinian IDs: Israel will not have it. As an occupying force, Israel is supposedly responsible for the population – while it shirks this responsibility with increasingly brutal measures of domination and revenge. Its military assaults were and still are the continuation of Israel’s consistent policy of separating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the Palestinians in its attempt to crush the people and turn it into a collection of separate, disconnected groups and individuals.

As the occupied, Palestinians have the right to fight the occupier. But this right is also subject to international law, to common sense, to international circumstances, to the leadership’s responsibility towards its public. Hamas has had its own internal political considerations in choosing the military path in spite of all the previous rounds of warfare that failed to achieve its declared national objectives. True, over the years Hamas has developed its own means and skills of warfare. But, as the 2014 war showed, it has been – and remains – inferior to Israel’s military might. Military confrontations are Israel’s home field, where it excels. It is precisely the field that should be avoided.

Amira Hass
6 July 2016

The Gaza Strip is part of the Palestinian Occupied Territory; together with the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. More than 70% of Gaza Palestinians are refugees, forced to leave their homes in the lands grabbed by the nascent state of Israel in 1948 and forbidden from returning.

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Amira Hass: Introduction to #Obliterated Families

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Gaza: A gaping wound

#ObliteratedFamilies

Behind every erased Gazan family is an Israeli pilot. Behind every orphaned child who has lost his brothers and sisters in the bombing is an Israeli commander who gave the order and a soldier who pulled the trigger. Behind every demolished house are the Israeli physicist and hi-tech specialist who calculated the optimal angles for maximal impact. And there is the army spokesperson (backed by legal experts) who always evaded the journalist’s question: how proportional is it to shell an entire building with all its inhabitants? What – in your laws – justifies killing 23 family members, babies, children and the elderly among them, in one fell swoop of a missile?

There is one very present absentee in the “stories” below: Israeli society. Whether those members of society directly responsible, from government ministers and general military staff down through the ranks, or those who are indirectly responsible in their support and refusal to know. Have the direct accomplices – most of whom preserve their armed anonymity – ever shown any interest in knowing who was targeted by their sophisticated smart bombs? Or how many unarmed civilians they killed, their names, how many girls and boys, how many members of a single family, how many entire families have been erased? Disastrously, the safe guess is that physical distance and the fact that both soldiers and commanders did not have to soil their hands with blood nor see the mangled bodies with their own eyes helped them greatly to bury any information, knowledge, and thought.

Before and between the major onslaughts of 2008-9, 2012 and 2014 “smaller-scale” Israeli assaults were carried out, and they too wiped out lives, or erased the toil of many years and added traumas onto past disasters. Another link in such a long chain of injustices that one’s head is dizzy with disbelief, or the need to forget. At times, Gazans themselves help one forget: with their humor, their warmth, the continuity of life and vitality their creativity which breaks through all barriers and limitations of the siege and the pain, their silences – for they are sick of telling, or because what’s the point. But more than ever, more than any previous large-scale or smaller-scale assault, after 2014, the quenched eyes of Gazans have recounted how that was the most horrific of attacks.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) calculated that 142 families lost three or more members, each of these families in a single Israeli shelling or bombing. The total was 742 persons, more than 25% of all Palestinian casualties of that summer. There is nothing more difficult than gathering testimonies from people whose families have been nearly wiped out, to try and describe the horrendous vacuum which has been created and cannot be filled. The choice of “only” ten families, is a statement: testimony gathering and reading must not become automatic. It mustn’t, lest feelings be dulled. Therefore, the silences and the spaces between the spoken and the unspoken, between the written and the unwritten, speak for all the rest.

The erasure of entire families was one of the appalling characteristics of the 2014 assault. These were no errors or mistaken personal choices on the part of a pilot or a navigator or a brigade commander. This was policy. There are no anonymous players here: the identity of the policy makers is well known, as are their names and positions. Between July 7 and August 26, Israel carried out about 6,000 air raids on the Gaza Strip and fired 14,500 tank shells and about 35,000 artillery shells. 2,251 Palestinians were killed, among them 1,462 civilians, 551 of whom were children, and 299 women. Some of the non-civilians killed – namely combatant members of the armed organizations – were not killed in battle but under the same civilian circumstances where their relatives were also killed: in their beds, in their own homes, during the fast-breaking meal, in their residential quarters.

As stated in B’Tselem’s report “Black Flag”, which investigated 70 of the 142 incidents, with the exception of a few cases Israel never gave any explanation for bombing or shelling those houses with their inhabitants inside. In other words, Israel never disclosed what and who were its targets: perhaps one of the family members, perhaps a weapons stash in the house or fire opened from a neighboring house? But the systematic action and the silence both show that Israel finds it ‘legitimate’ and ‘proportional’ to kill entire families: if one of their members is a Hamas fighter, if a weapons stash is held nearby or in their home, or for any other similar reason. What does it mean? That it is legitimate to shell nearly every home in Israel, for nearly every Israeli family has an armed soldier, and many homes are inhabited by senior army officials, and important military and security installations are situated in the heart of Israeli civilian population. This is an absurd and criminal criterion of warfare, opposed to international law and basic principles of justice. But the majority in Israeli society embraces it as right and justified.

According to OCHA, Hamas and other Palestinian armed organizations launched 4,881 rockets and fired 1,753 mortar shells against Israel. 94% of these reached the maximum range of 50 kilometers, mentions B’Tselem. This fire targeted mostly Israeli civilian communities. Because of the limited technology of Hamas’ weapons, and thanks to Israel’s state-of-the-art defense capacities and the evacuation of numerous Israeli residents, the number of Israeli civilian casualties was minimal: six Israeli civilians were killed, among them one 5-year old child. The 67 Israeli soldiers killed during the onslaught were casualties in battle. The Palestinian combatants who killed them were defending their own population from the invader.

The Gaza Strip is not a sovereign state, even if the Hamas regime sometimes behaves like a sovereign government of a liberated territory. According to international agreements, the Strip is an inseparable part of the Palestinian state which the world is still committed to creating, at least by declaration. It is still under Israeli occupation – even though the parameters of control differ from those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. For example, the population registry of Gaza, as that of the West Bank, is subordinate to the Israeli Ministry of Interior and its policies. Only upon Israeli approval is the Palestinian Authority able to issue new ID cards to 16-year-olds in the Gaza Strip every year, as in the West Bank. Thousands of Palestinians, among them refugees from Syria, live in the Gaza Strip without Palestinian IDs: Israel will not have it. As an occupying force, Israel is supposedly responsible for the population – while it shirks this responsibility with increasingly brutal measures of domination and revenge. Its military assaults were and still are the continuation of Israel’s consistent policy of separating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the Palestinians in its attempt to crush the people and turn it into a collection of separate, disconnected groups and individuals.

As the occupied, Palestinians have the right to fight the occupier. But this right is also subject to international law, to common sense, to international circumstances, to the leadership’s responsibility towards its public. Hamas has had its own internal political considerations in choosing the military path in spite of all the previous rounds of warfare that failed to achieve its declared national objectives. True, over the years Hamas has developed its own means and skills of warfare. But, as the 2014 war showed, it has been – and remains – inferior to Israel’s military might. Military confrontations are Israel’s home field, where it excels. It is precisely the field that should be avoided.

Amira Hass
6 July 2016

This is the introduction to #OBLITERATEDFAMILIES, the stories of families whose lives shattered during the 2014 Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip.

Amira Hass: I Went to See the Plight of the Dried-out Settlements. I Found a Pool

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Amira Hass, Haaretz, June 26, 2016

With Israel having cut the Palestinians’ water supply, I visited two settlements where the people are supposedly suffering too.

Thus tweeted MK Bezalel Smotrich (Habayit Hayehudi) on Friday: “No joke: We’ve gone back 100 years!” He reported on five stations for providing drinking water that were placed that morning in the settlement of Kedumim.

That day, the religious Zionist weekly Makor Rishon published an article titled “The water crisis in Judea and Samaria: In the settlement of Eli huge bags of drinking water were distributed to the residents.”

So I set out to witness this suffering at two settlements. I left before I saw the tweet by one Avraham Benyamin in response to Smotrich: “We’re waiting for a series of empathetic articles in Haaretz. We’ll continue to wait.”

Indeed, last week I started writing my annual series of articles on the systematic theft of water from the Palestinians. I was surprised not to find any newspaper reports about water problems in the settlements. There weren’t any on Army Radio and Israel Radio – notorious clandestine supporters of the BDS movement. But neither did I find any mention of it on websites linked to the settlement lobby.

After all, since the beginning of June, when the Mekorot national water company began cutting water supplies to the Palestinians in the Salfit and Nablus areas by some 30 to 50 percent, Israeli spokespeople have claimed there is a shortage in the settlements too. (Or in the unsanitized words of a Palestinian employee in the Civil Administration: They’re cutting back from the Arabs so there will be water for the settlers.)

Makor Rishon reporter Hodaya Karish Hazony wrote: “In the communities of Migdalim, Yitzhar, Elon Moreh, Tapuah, Givat Haroeh, Alonei Shiloh and others there have been water stoppages. ‘We’re between insanity and despair on this matter,’ said one resident.”

So I went to check the water shortage that’s driving the people from insanity to despair in Eli. I looked for people lining up for water. I didn’t find them. Then I drove from the center of the lush settlement to isolated Hill No. 9, the site of the Hayovel neighborhood mentioned in the article.

There I found two huge and swollen blue sacks from the Water Authority, with faucets attached to them. A sign requests that you “maintain order” while waiting and notes that “priority will be given to the elderly, the ill and children.”

At about 3 P.M. I didn’t see any elderly, ill people or children waiting next to the faucets. Nor did I see any ordinary adults. A few drops leaked from the faucets and wet the asphalt. People entered or left their cars. Artificial grass adorned areas near the neighborhood’s prefab homes.

Near the soldiers’ guard post, about 50 meters from one sack of water, there was an area of natural grass that was quite green. Next to it were a few tree saplings, and the soil around them was wet, with several puddles. A soldier said that over the week there had been several water stoppages, and he thought the sacks were brought on Thursday. The article said Wednesday.

In a small public building nearby, the bathroom was open and sparkling clean. The toilet flushed nicely, and refreshing water flowed from the sink’s faucet. A woman who got out of her car next to the sack of water said, hesitantly, “I’ve used it sometimes.” And why not more? “It’s unpleasant; the water is warm.”

Further down, in the center of Eli, I came across girls holding bags with towels and bathing suits. “Is the pool open? Where is it?” I asked.

Following their instructions I arrived at the Eli pool. Splashing sounds and the joyful shouts of swimmers could be heard from behind the fence. The lawns around the pool were natural and green. I wondered: Where’s the solidarity? Why don’t they bring water from the center of Eli to the neighborhood that’s suffering because of its altitude?

Makor Rishon quoted Meir Shilo, head of infrastructure for the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council: “The problem is overconsumption caused by the [settlers’] population increase and mainly, it seems, because of the consumption of water for agriculture.”

Dror Etkes, an independent researcher of the Israeli colonization policy, told Haaretz that in the settlement bloc surrounding Shiloh, “settlers are cultivating 2,746 dunams [679 acres; most of this is around Shiloh: 2,600 dunams]. Of this, 2,133 dunams are private Palestinian land.”

Meaning: In recent years, the settlers have discovered that piracy (as opposed to state theft) for agricultural purposes facilitates the grab of more Palestinian land than the construction of villas or prefab homes does.

The army, by preventing the lawful Palestinian owners from reaching their land, has made this piracy possible. And along with the private illegal agriculture comes the increase in water consumption at the expense of the Palestinians and their agriculture and drinking water.

From Eli I traveled west to the settlement of Kedumim, where the lush streets welcomed me. I looked for the water stations that Smotrich had tweeted about.

From my car windshield I saw a sign: “The swimming pool in Kedumim is open. Register now.” They probably forgot to take it down from last year.

In the Rashi neighborhood I arrived at a water-distribution station, under the awning of the Rashi religious study hall. Opposite stood a truck with a large water tank. Someone returned from it with a pail and headed for the prefab homes at the top of the hill.

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Amira Hass: Israel Incapable of Telling Truth About Water It Steals From Palestinians

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Water is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it difficult to defend its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive policy with pretexts of security and God

Amira Hass, Haaretz, Jun 21, 2016

Israeli spokespeople have three answers ready to pull out when they respond to questions on the water shortage in West Bank Palestinian towns – which stands out starkly compared to the hydrological smugness of the settlements: 1) The Palestinian water system is old, so it suffers from water loss; 2) the Palestinians steal water from each other, and from the Israelis; and 3) in general, Israel has in its great generosity doubled the amount of water it supplies to the Palestinians, compared to what was called for in the Oslo Accords.

“Supplies,” the spokespeople will write in their responses. They will never say Israel sells the Palestinians 64 million cubic meters of water a year instead of the 31 million cubic meters agreed to in the Oslo Accords. Accords that were signed in 1994, and that were supposed to come to an end in 1999. They will not say that Israel sells the Palestinians water that it first stole from them.

Bravo for the demagogy. Bravo for the one-eighth portion of truth in the answer. Water is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it difficult to defend its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive policy with pretexts of security and God. That is why it must blur and distort this basic fact: Israel controls the water sources. And being in control, it imposes a quota on the amount of water the Palestinians are allowed to produce and consume. On average, the Palestinians consume 73 liters per person per day. Below the recommended minimum. Israelis consume a daily 180 liters on average, and there are those who say even more. And here, unlike there, you will not find thousands who consume 20 liters a day. In the summer.

True, some Palestinians steal water. Desperate farmers, regular chiselers. If it was not for the water shortage, it would not happen. A large part of the thefts are in Area C, under full Israeli control. So please, let the IDF and police find all the criminals. But to justify the crisis with theft – that is deceit.

With the Oslo Accords, Israel imposed an outrageous, racist, arrogant and brutal division of water sources in the West Bank: 80 percent for Israelis (on both sides of the Green Line), and 20 percent for the Palestinians (from wells drilled before 1967, which the Palestinians continued to operate; from the Mekorot water company; from future wells to be drilled in the eastern basin of the mountain aquifer; from agricultural wells and springs. Many of the springs, by the way, dried out because of Israeli deep wells, or because the settlers took them over. The ways of theft know no bounds.)

Twenty percent is actually good, because now only about 14 percent of the water from the mountain aquifer is accessible to Palestinians in the West Bank. Technical reasons, irregularities and human error, insufferable Israeli bureaucratic foot-dragging, whose entire goal is to delay the development of the Palestinian water infrastructure and the upgrading of what now exists; unexpected difficulties in producing water from wells in the allowed places, old wells that have dried out or whose production has fallen, and which Israel does not allow to be replaced by newly-drilled wells – all these explain how we have reached 14 percent instead of what was signed in Oslo, and why Israel sells the Palestinians more water that it committed to back then. After all, it has been left with more water to produce from this natural resource, which, according to international law, an occupying country is forbidden to use for the purposes of its civilian population.

During the summer, the problem becomes worse, of course. The heat rises and the Palestinians’ demand for water rises, not just the settlers’. So in the Salfit district and east of Nablus, Mekorot reduces the amount of water it sells to Palestinians. The spokespeople will not state it that way. They will say “regulating,” they will say, too. that in the settlements “there are also complaints about a water shortage” (it seems I missed the report on Arutz 7 about it).

But in Farkha, Salfit and Deir al-Hatab people describe, on the verge of tears, how humiliating it is to live for weeks without running water. And we have not even spoken about the dozens of Palestinian communities on both sides of the Green Line that Israel, a light unto the nations, refuses to allow to connect to the water infrastructure.

Amira Hass
Haaretz Correspondent

 

Amira Hass: Israel Admits Cutting West Bank Water Supply, but Blames Palestinian Authority

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Israel says region’s intense heatwave combined with Palestinian Water Authority’s refusal to approve additional infrastructure had led to ‘old and limited pipes being unable to transfer all the water needed.’


A water tanker in the Palestinian village of Halhul, near Hebron. Michal Fattal

Amira Hass, Haaretz, Jun 21, 2016

Since the start of this month, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been suffering the harsh effects of a drastic cut in the water supplied them by Israel’s Mekorot water company.

In the Salfit region of the West Bank and in three villages east of Nablus, homes have had no running water for more than two weeks. Factories there have been shut down, gardens and plant nurseries have been ruined and animals have died of thirst or been sold to farmers outside the affected areas.

People have been improvising by drawing water from agricultural wells, or by buying mineral water or paying for water brought in large tankers for household use and to water their livestock. But purchasing water that way is extremely expensive.

Palestinian Water Authority officials told Haaretz that people at Mekorot have told them the supply cuts were going to last the entire summer. The sources said they were told by the Israelis that there is a water shortage and that everything must be done to assure that the local reservoirs (located in the settlements) stay full so that the necessary pressure can be maintained to stream the water through the pipelines leading to other settlements and Palestinian communities.

Palestinian municipal officials say that Palestinian workers for the Civil Administration who are sent to regulate the quantities of water in the Mekorot pipes told them the water cuts were made to meet the area settlements’ demand for water, which is rising in the hot weather. Similar cuts were initiated in the same areas last year, when the severe water supply interruptions also occurred during Ramadan.

Mekorot would not answer questions, referring Haaretz to the Israel Water Authority and the Foreign Ministry. Uri Schor, the Water Authority spokesman, wrote that the quantities of water Israel sells to the Palestinians throughout the West Bank, including in the Salfit area, has gone up over the years.

“A localized water shortage has developed for Israelis and Palestinians alike in northern Samaria and it stems from the especially high consumption because of the region’s intense heat,” Schor wrote. He added that the shortage developed because the Palestinian Water Authority is refusing to approve additional water infrastructure in the West Bank through the joint water committee, “which has led to the old and limited pipes being unable to transfer all the water needed in the region.”

An Israeli security source said settlements are also complaining about water shortages.

Palestinians deny foot-dragging, say water goes to settlements

A senior Palestinian Water Authority official denied that Palestinian foot-dragging was contributing to the water shortages.

“The Israeli Authority is misleading the public,” he said. “The pipes do not need to be upgraded. USAID, for example, just finished the new pipeline in Deir Sha’ar to serve the population in Hebron and Bethlehem. Israel needs to increase the pumping rate from the Deir Sha’ar pumping station and more than half a million Palestinian would receive their equitable share.

“Israel, however, submitted a project to increase the size of the pipe serving Israeli settlements in the Tekoa area, and the Israel Water Authority is blackmailing the Palestinian Authority to approve the Israeli project in exchange for increasing the water from the Deir Sha’ar booster station.”

Schor brought examples from the months of January-May over the past four years that show that there has indeed been an increase in the quantities of water supplied to the Salfit and Nablus districts, from 2.7 million cubic meters of water in 2013 to 3.48 cubic meters this year.

But the internal records of the Palestinian Water Authority show that in May of this year there was a cut in the water supplied to the town of Bidya, with 12,000 residents, from 50,470 cubic meters in March, to 43,440 in May. In May of last year, Bidya received 45,000 cubic meters.

In the town Qarawat Bani Hassan, consumption in May was higher than in March (17,000 cubic meters compared to 15,000), but last May consumption reached 20,000 cubic meters, and according to a Palestinian official there’s no way to explain the drop in usage other than by a drop in supply. The supply cut in June, meanwhile, has been much sharper – of up to 50 percent per hour.

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April 3, 2008
Amira Hass in Madison

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Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
7:30 pm
Pyle Center, UW Campus

Amira Hass is a world-renowned Israeli journalist, and the only one who actually lives among the Palestinians that she reports on. She is a courageous and articulate voice on the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.

Hass covers Palestinian affairs for the Israeli daily Haaretz. She is the author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza and Reporting from Ramallah. Known for her honest and often brutal portrayals of the impact of Israeli occupation on the lives of ordinary Palestinians, she received the 1999 International World Press Freedom Award in recognition of her work in the Gaza Strip. She gave this talk as part of the “Reporting the Middle East” lecture series at UW-Madison in October 2003.

Hass will also be a guest on A Public Affair on Friday, April 4th from noon to 1:00 p.m. on WORT 89.9 FM with host Judith Siers-Poisson.

Sponsored by the UW Middle East Studies Program. Co-sponsors include the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project and Playgrounds for Palestine — Madison.

Amira Hass: What a Strange ‘Abroad’

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Amira Hass, Haaretz, Feb 14, 2007

The Gaza Strip is ‘abroad’ in a strange way. Israelis need a passport to get there, and Palestinian Jerusalemites need a laissez passer – the same one they need to present when they fly to Paris via Ben-Gurion International Airport.

Now it is official: The Gaza Strip is “abroad.” As of February 1, the few Israelis whose entry into the Strip is approved by the army have had to present a passport at the Erez crossing, and they are listed on the Interior Ministry’s computer as having crossed the country’s borders.

The Gaza Strip is “abroad” in a strange way. Israelis need a passport to get there, and Palestinian Jerusalemites need a laissez passer – the same one they need to present when they fly to Paris via Ben-Gurion International Airport. But when these same Jerusalemites go to Jordan via the Allenby Bridge, they use a Jordanian passport. And the Palestinians who live in that “abroad” – the Gazans – are, for the meantime, exempt from crossing with a Palestinian passport; this exemption also applies to residents of the West Bank, by order of the interior minister.

The confusing multiplicity of procedures is still more remarkable in light of the fact that Israel allows only a few people to enter and leave the Strip. Only a small number of Israelis receive this permission – mainly those with relatives in Gaza or people, primarily women, who have been married to Gaza residents for years. Receiving a permit requires prior coordination, which is very cumbersome, and it sometimes takes days until the request for a permit or a permit extension finds a fax line without a busy signal at the “office for Israeli affairs” in the Civil Administration, a military body to which the interior minister has granted the authority to continue operating the crossing.

Crossing the approximately half a kilometer that separates the Palestinian side from the Israeli one requires additional coordination, on the phone, and an hours-long wait until the soldiers and clerks on the Israeli side allow permit holders to walk through. But this is not what makes the strangeness of the Gazan “abroad” unique; to many, this is simply reminiscent of the difficulties that totalitarian regimes imposed on travel between countries in Eastern Europe.

The “abroad” of Gaza is strange primarily for a different reason, a more fundamental one: All its residents are listed in the same population registry as residents of the West Bank, which is not “abroad,” and the entire list is controlled by Israel’s Interior Ministry. This control gives Interior Ministry representatives in the Civil Administration authority that the Palestinian interior minister lacks. This control allowed Israel to deprive hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their residency status after 1967. It allowed the continuation of marital, social, economic, religious and cultural ties between Gaza and the West Bank until 1991 – and then, it severed those ties. This control allows Israel to prevent the addition of foreign residents to the population registry; it allows Israel to intervene in, and even decide, the choice of a partner, place of study, type of medical treatment, address, quality time with children, participation in celebrations and funerals, the writing of wills and distribution of family property. Israel has the authority to ban the entry of friends or family members who are not Palestinian residents – not just their entry into Israel, but also into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since October 2000, the ban has been comprehensive.

Only Palestinians registered as residents in the Israeli computer system can cross at the Rafah terminal, when it is open. Israel has the authority to ban Gazans from traveling to the West Bank or living there, and has been doing so with increasing fervor since 1991, when it began implementing the closure policy. This is the “abroad” that Israelis require a passport to enter. This is the “abroad” for which Israel argues that it has no responsibility. And this is the greatness of the Israeli occupation: It manages to present itself as nonexistent, while its authority reaches all the way to the bedroom.

No, this is not a recommendation to take another unilateral step and erase the Gazans from the Palestinian population registry, which is under Israeli control, in addition to the geographic and human separation. On the contrary! It is preferable for Israel to continue snooping around in their bedrooms than to take a step that would finally complete the separation between Gaza residents and their brothers in the West Bank.

There is reason for concern. A move such as erasing the Gazans from the registry fits the thought process that has characterized Israeli policy toward the Strip since 1991. Over the past 16 years, residents of the crowded, 360-square-kilometer Strip have been ordered to get used to its transformation into a kind of isolated autarkic economy and make do with the little it produces: increasingly little (and increasingly polluted) water; diminishing land; declining sources of income; industry and agriculture with no markets; and inferior educational and health institutions, due to their isolation from the world and the West Bank.

The peak of this policy, so far, was the disengagement in 2005. This is a policy that contradicts what is written in the Oslo Accords, which call the Strip and the West Bank a single territorial unit, as well as international resolutions about the solution for peace. But evacuating a few thousand settlers from the Strip was successfully marketed as Israeli moderation, even as Israel strengthened all its methods of control over the West Bank. Israel is also liable to market the deletion of Gazan names from the population registry as some kind of goodwill gesture. But such a move would only intensify the human distress of Gaza’s 1.4 million residents, as well as their separation from the world. And that is a proven recipe for keeping a reasonable peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians at a distance.