A fence guards a neighbourhood under construction in the Ariel settlement in the Occupied West Bank. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 11 2015 (IPS)

Just weeks after an 18-month-old baby was killed in an arson attack in the Palestinian village of Duma, located south of Nablus city in the Occupied West Bank, a United Nations special committee has blasted Israel’s policy of settlement expansion, saying it is the root cause of violence towards Palestinians.

In the first seven months of 2015, the U.N. has documented over 120 attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians living in the West Bank, including shootings, beatings, cutting down of fruit trees, poisoning of livestock and dumping of waste on Palestinian farmland.
Having completed their annual fact-finding mission to Jordan on Aug. 8, the same day that the father of the baby boy also succumbed to severe burns after settlers threw a fire bomb into the family’s home, the Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories stated it was “alarmed” at the escalation of violence towards Palestinians, blaming a “climate of impunity relating to the activities of settlers” for tragedies such as the attack on Jul. 31.

In a press release issued on Aug. 10, the committee revealed that testimony from a range of civil society groups and Palestinian officials all pointed to one conclusion: that until the government of Israel reigns in illegal settlement activity in the West Bank, the violence will likely continue.

According to the non-governmental organisation Peace Now, Israeli settlers in the West Bank currently number some 350,000, in addition to an estimated 300,000 settlers residing in parts of Jerusalem that Israel captured and illegally annexed from Jordan in 1967.

Settlements are primarily concentrated in a zone marked ‘Area C’, which accounts for 61 percent of the West Bank’s territory. Here, an estimated 60,000 Palestinians are squeezed into an ever-shrinking space, while new settlements further segregate and marginalize them in an already miniscule area.

Last year, Israel upped its annual spending on settlement activity in the West Bank to 100 million dollars, representing an increase of 600 percent from the previous year. Factor in settlement expenditure in the Golan Heights, and the number shoots up to 200 million dollars per year.

Peace Now says that since 2009 the Israeli government has approved bids for some 4,485 new units including houses, roads, industrial buildings and agricultural sites; in the last two years alone, two-thirds of fresh construction has taken place on the Palestinian side of a border agreed upon in the 2003 Geneva Initiative.

The U.N. has, on countless occasions, reiterated that the building of settlements on occupied land is illegal under international law. Despite repeated entreaties by a string of U.N. secretaries-general, including most recently Ban Ki-moon, there are now close to 220 Israeli settlements dotting the 2,100 square-mile West Bank.

According to one comprehensive report by the New York Times, these residences range from scrappy “hilltop outposts”, to sprawling cities that house their own universities and movie theatres.

The largest of these, an Orthodox enclave known as Modiin Illit, houses 60,000 residents and is growing at a terrific pace, recording 60 births every week in 2009.

The separation wall runs between the Israeli settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev and a Palestinian refugee camp. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS

Besides annexing Palestinian land and further fragmenting West Bank territory, settlement expansion has also contributed to a climate of impunity in which crimes against Palestinians – often at the hands of settlers themselves – continue unchecked.

A recent report by the Israeli rights group Yesh Din revealed that “only 7.4 percent of police investigations carried out by the SJ (Samaria and Judea) District Police into offenses committed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians and Palestinian property in the West Bank have resulted in indictments against the suspects.”

The organisation says the figure is based on a sample of some 1,000 investigations carried out by the SJ District Police between 2005 and 2014. Many acts of violence and vandalism occur on Palestinian farmland, or on the outskirts of Palestinian villages.

Yesh Din has labeled these attacks as “a calculated strategy designed to restrict and dispossesses Palestinians of their land.”

In the first seven months of 2015 alone, the U.N. has documented over 120 attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians living in the West Bank. Reports by Yesh Din indicate that these violent incidents run the gamut from shootings and beatings, to running Palestinians over with vehicles.

Settlers also routinely attempt to destroy Palestinian farmland by cutting down trees, setting fields ablaze, damaging machinery or stealing and poisoning livestock.

Attacks on property account for 41 percent of all complaints filed, half of which involve the destruction of fruit trees. Since 1967, over 800,000 olive trees have been uprooted in the West Bank and Gaza.

Yesh Din also says that five percent of the SJ District Police’s investigative files “include the killing of farm animals, desecration of mosques and cemeteries, discharging of sewage into Palestinian farmland [and] dumping of waste on land belonging to Palestinians.”

A further 14 percent of criminal offenses against Palestinians involve settlers attempting to seize Palestinian land by practicing unauthorized cultivation, fencing off certain areas, illegally trespassing or setting up portable homes and greenhouses on the Palestinian side of the border.

Although the Israeli government often publically condemns settler violence, a quick look at the numbers paints a clearer picture of its policies: according to a comprehensive analysis of the settlements’ economic costs published by the Tel Aviv-based Macro Center for Political Economics in 2015, the state allocated 950 dollars to each Israeli resident in the West Bank in 2014, twice the amount spent on residents in larger cities like Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

Its expenditure on Israeli citizens in more isolated settlements amounted to 1,480 dollars per person last year.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Soundus, a young girl being treated in hospital for injuries from Israeli shelling of Gaza (August 2014). Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By Khaled Alashqar
GAZA CITY, Aug 16 2014 (IPS)

“My child became blind and lost the ability to speak, his dad died and his three brothers are seriously wounded. He still has not been told about the loss of his dad,” says the mother of 7-year-old Mohamad Badran. 

Mohamad is in hospital for treatment after being seriously injured in Israel shelling of Gaza. “My only way to communicate with him is by hugging him,” his mother adds.

Israeli air attacks and shelling in Gaza have left more than 1,870 dead and thousands injured. They have caused damage to infrastructure and hundreds of homes, forcing a large number of families to seek shelter in schools run by the U.N. agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA).Some of the children have suffered serious injuries which cannot be treated in Gaza due to the limited medical infrastructure and capacities caused by the Israeli blockade.

In a news note, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that Israeli airstrikes and shelling have taken a “devastating toll … on Gaza’s youngest and most vulnerable.” It said that at least 429 children had been killed and 2,744 severely injured.

Some of the children injured have suffered serious injuries which cannot be treated in Gaza due to the limited medical capacities caused by the Israeli blockade.

According to UNICEF, about 400,000 children – half of Gaza’s 1.8 million people are children under the age of 18 – are showing symptoms of psychological problems, including stress and depression, clinging to parents and nightmares.

Monika Awad, spokesperson for UNICEF in Jerusalem, told IPS that 30 percent of dead as a result of the Israeli military attacks are children, and “UNICEF and its local partners have been implementing psychosocial support programmes in Gaza schools where refugee families are sheltering.”

”We have a moral responsibility to protect the right of children to live in safety and dignity in accordance with U.N. charter for children’s rights,” she added.

However, the acute psychological effects of the Israeli attacks Gaza that have emerged among children, such as loss of speech, are among the biggest challenges that face psychotherapists.

Dr Sami Eweda, a consultant and psychiatrist with the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (a local civil society organisation working on trauma and healing issues), told IPS: “When the Israeli war against Gaza ends, psychotherapists will grapple with many expected dilemmas such as the cases of the murder of entire families and the murder of the parents who represent the central protection and tenderness for the children. Such terrible cases put children in a state of loss and shock.”

According to Eweda, “we first need to stop the main cause of these traumas and psychological problems, which is the Israeli war against Gaza, and then begin an emergency intervention to support children’s health and treat traumas and severe psychological effects, including the loss of speech, which is considered as one of the self-defence mechanisms for overcoming traumas.”

Throughout the Gaza Strip, where entire neighbourhoods such as Shujaiyeh and Khuza’a have been destroyed by the Israeli invasion and heavy bombardment, access to basic services is practically impossible.

Displaced children in a UN-run school in the Shujaiyeh neighbourhood of Gaza (August 2014). Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

People in these areas have been suffering difficulties in accessing drinking water and have been living in an almost complete blackout since the Israeli shelling of the power station which was the sole source of electricity in besieged Gaza.

Social Watch– a network of civil society organisations from around the world monitoring their governments’ commitments to end poverty and achieve gender justice – Thursday called on the international community to declare the Gaza Strip an “international humanitarian disaster zone”, as requested by Palestinian NGOs.

“The unrestricted violation of international law and humanitarian principles adds to the instability in the region and further fuels the arms race and the marginalisation of the issues of poverty eradication and social justice that should be the main common priority,” said Social Watch.

“The recurrence of these episodes in Gaza is the result of not having acted before on similar war crimes and of not having pursued with good faith negotiations towards a lasting peace,” it added.

In a press release, Save the Children, the world’s leading independent organisation for promoting children’s rights, said: “Children never start wars, yet they are the ones that are killed, maimed, traumatised and left homeless, terrified and permanently scarred.”

“Save the Children will not stop until innocent children are no longer under fire and the root causes of this conflict are addressed. If the international community does not take action now, the violence against children in Gaza will haunt our generation forever.”

In an interview with IPS, Save the Children’s spokesperson in Gaza, Asama Damo, said: ”We call for a permanent ceasefire and for lifting the siege on Gaza to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid and basic services to children.”

“We also need the international community to intervene to end the catastrophic humanitarian situation and fight the skin diseases that are widely spreading among the refugees at UNRWA schools due to overcrowding and congestion.”

According to UNRWA, 87 of their schools are being used as shelters by the refugees, half of whom are children under the age of 18. Ziad Thabet, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education in Gaza, told IPS:

“Israel deliberately targeted educational institutions and the education sector in general; large proportion of those killed and wounded are children and school students. Many schools and kindergartens were attacked.”

In the current disastrous situation in Gaza, it seems not only that the burnt bodies of Gaza’s children are the heritage of war, but also that their educational and health future is being burned.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Phakiso Mochochoko, representing the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), addresses the Security Council’s open debate on the promotion and strengthening of the rule of law in the maintenance of international peace and security, and the role of the ICC. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Becky Bergdahl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 18 2012 (IPS)

Ten years after the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened its doors in The Hague, the United Nations Security Council held its first open discussion on the role of the court, with some nations reiterating complaints that its docket is highly politicised and has unfairly singled out African nations for censure.

The ICC is the only permanent international court with a mandate to prosecute individuals accused of the most heinous crimes – genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The official seat of the court is in the Netherlands, but proceedings can take place anywhere in the world. The ICC has received complaints about alleged crimes in over a hundred countries, but investigations have only been opened into seven states so far, all of them in Africa – Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Kenya, Libya and Cote d’Ivoire.

The ICC can either undertake an investigation on the prosecutor’s own initiative, if a case is referred to the court by the concerned states parties themselves, or if the case is referred to the court by the United Nations Security Council.

During the debate on Wednesday, representatives from several countries expressed concerns about the Security Council taking politicised decisions about which cases to refer to the Court.

The fact that the Security Council has not referred the burning case of Syria to the ICC, for example, was highlighted by representatives from a number of states.

Human rights groups have made similar critiques.

Human Rights Watch  recently sent a letter to 121 foreign ministers urging them to address the inconsistency of the Security Council’s referrals to the ICC. The letter calls for a development of a “coherent approach for referrals… to avoid double standards”.

”What I found most enlightening was the second part of the debate, with excellent interventions of non-Security Council members,” Richard Dicker, international justice director at Human Rights Watch, told IPS. “You heard again and again the same phrases repeated, a call for consistency.”

Under the ICC’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, the Security Council shall refer a situation in any country to the ICC prosecutor if it determines that the situation amounts to a threat to international peace and security. But according to Human Rights Watch, the Council has failed to refer cases that are politically controversial, such as the situation in Gaza or Syria.

Human Rights Watch especially highlights the influence of the United States, Russia and China, all permanent veto-wielding members of the Security Council, and accuses the superpowers of going after their perceived enemies while protecting leaders of countries that they have close ties with.

”What I found lacking in the U.S. ambassador’s comment today was any firm commitment to an ICC referral on Syria,” Dicker said.

He said that even when it comes to the two cases that the Security Council has managed to refer to the ICC – Libya and Sudan – the actions of the Council have been insufficient.

For example, the Council referred the case of Libya unanimously to the ICC. But once the Muammar Gaddafi regime fell, the Security Council no longer actively supported the ICC investigation, nor did it press Libya’s new government to cooperate with the court.

”The court is just a light switch for the Security Council members to turn on and off to advance their political agenda… The Council seems to regard the ICC as a marriage of convenience,” Dicker told IPS.

Song Sang-Hyun, president of the ICC, was present at the Security Council meeting on Wednesday, as the first ICC president ever to be invited to the Council. He was obviously aware of the criticism being leveled at the Court and its relation to the Security Council.

”The ICC is a young institution… with plenty of work and progress, and still much to learn,” Sang-Hyun said.

He also expressed concern about funding, noting that “it is difficult to sustain a system” where the Security Council can refer cases to the ICC on behalf of all 193 U.N. member states while the cost of pursuing the cases is paid only by states parties to the ICC, those which have ratified the Rome Statute.

Currently, 121 nations are formal members of the ICC, 33 of them in Africa. While the African Union has advised its members not to cooperate with the ICC arrest warrant issued against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Malian government officials recently went to The Hague to request that an investigation be opened into atrocities committed by Islamists in the country’s north.

Speaking to Women News Network, the president of the Assembly of State Parties to the Rome Statute said she is working to restore political support for the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“Yes, there are concerns that there is less political enthusiasm about the court right now, and one of the reasons is quite obvious. The court is 10 years old so a lot of countries who in principle are very committed, they just take the court for granted. A lot of countries do not realise how much political support the court still needs,” said Ambassador Tiina Intelmann.

“They are forgetting that we are really in the business of trying to bring perpetrators of atrocities to justice. And it just so happens that very often the perpetrators of such crimes are people who have held or are holding high positions (in government). So, by definition, political support is necessary because these issues, besides being legal, are also political.”

U.S. counterterrorism measures are under intense scrutiny from United Nations (U.N.) experts and civil rights groups declaring drone strikes illegal under current frameworks.

During the 20th Session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva from Jun. 18 to Jul. 6, these experts declared such measures in urgent need of greater accountability and transparency.

Targeted-killing programs, including drone strikes, are “a strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability”, wrote former special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Philip Alston in his 2010 report to the council.

A drone launches from the deck of the USS Lassen. The legality of U.S. drone strikes is coming under increasing scrutiny and questioning. Credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery/ CC by 2.0

Two years later, strategies that the United States justifies as a necessary response to terrorism remain questionable both in legality and according to humanitarian principles.

Collateral Damage

Used by the United States in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, drones have quickly become the counterterrorist weapon of choice. Accompanying drone strikes is collateral damage – military terminology for civilian casualties – which has subsequently become a central issue.

Drone technology itself is not inaccurate. But targets are often imprecise, as they are based on intelligence pinpointing suspected terrorists or areas of suspicious activity. Ensuring that innocent bystanders are absent from populated areas where terrorist activity has been identified is a challenge that all airborne military operations face.

In Pakistan, many civil rights activists vehemently oppose U.S. drone attacks. Among them is former cricketer Imran Kahn, leader of the Tehreek-e-Insaf party, who believes drone attacks are illegal on the grounds that they kill innocent civilians.

At the Human Rights Council Tuesday, Christof Heyns, current special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, called for more transparency and accountability from the United States. He urged that a framework be developed and adhered to, and pressed for accurate records of civilian deaths.

According to a recent report in the New York Times, the U.S. government’s current method for counting civilian deaths takes an exceptionally broad view of legitimate targets, deeming all males of military age to be terrorist combatants.

This methodology goes some way towards explaining the gulf between the calculations of independent media reports and official figures, which claim that civilian casualties are minimal.

An Associated Press investigation found that “the drone strikes were killing far fewer civilians than many Pakistanis are led to believe and that a significant majority of the dead were combatants”. Other reports, however, estimate hundreds of civilian casualties in the Pakistani region.

Dangerous global rules

“The United States has cobbled together its own legal framework for targeted killing, with standards that are far less stringent than the law allows,” Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told the council Wednesday.

Shamsi also took issue with the lack of transparency of military programs based on “a secret legal criteria, entirely secret evidence, and a secret process”, she said.

In defence of its policy of secrecy, the U.S. government filed a 50-page brief just before a midnight deadline, Wednesday, which stated that “whether or not the CIA has the authority to be, or is in fact, directly involved in targeted lethal operations remains classified”.

The report came in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU last year, which requested transparency on the killing of three American citizens in Yemen last year.

“The international community’s concern about the U.S. targeted killing program is continuing to grow because of the unlawfully broad authority our government asserts to kill ‘suspected terrorists’ far from any battlefield, without meaningful transparency or accountability,” Shamsi told IPS.

The lack of a legal framework allows for drone strikes to be implemented at will, in non-conflict zones and on the basis of loosely defined terrorist threats, without permission from the host nation.

“I think we’re in for very dangerous precedents that can be used by countries on all sides,” Heynes, the special rapporteur, said, voicing his concern regarding legal loopholes.

“In essence, drones cancel out national sovereignty,” Tom Engelhardt, co-author of Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, told IPS. “The rules of the game are one country’s sovereignty trumps that of another.”

It is estimated that more than 50 nations have drones, are developing them, or are planning to buy them.

Citing a recent contributor to his blog, TomDispatch, Engelhardt described the unmanned aircraft as  “a technology that has morphed into a policy”.

Fuelling terror

In a written speech submitted to the council, John Brennan, U.S. counterterrorism chief, deemed the use of drones a legal, ethical and wise way of conducting sensitive counterterror operations.

According to Dyke Weatherington, deputy director responsible for acquisition oversight for the Department of Defence’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), “combatant commanders and warfighters place value in the inherent features of unmanned systems – especially their persistence, versatility, and reduced risk to human life.”

But disregarding national boundaries and the inability to distinguish innocent civilians from terrorists in targeted vicinities render drones a questionable means of countering terrorism.

In a report to the council Wednesday, Ben Emmerson, special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, underscored the U.N. General Assembly’s consensus that counterterrorism measures that abuse human rights actually help spread terrorism.

The deaths of innocent civilians alienate communities and hand terrorists a propaganda tool that can bolster recruitment.

“Human rights abuses have all too often contributed to the grievances which cause people to make the wrong choices and to resort to terrorism,” according to the unedited document.

“The Special Rapporteur strongly believes that human rights compliant counter-terrorism measures help to prevent the recruitment of individuals to acts of terrorism.”

Heyns urged compliance with humanitarian law through “strategies applied to prevent casualties, as well as measures in place to provide prompt, thorough, effective and independent public investigation of alleged violations”.

Nevertheless, he told reporters at the council’s meeting, “I don’t think we have the full answer to the legal framework; we certainly don’t have the answer to the accountability issues.”

Women's rights and reproductive health are critical factors in sustainable development. Credit:Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 22 2012 (IPS)

What does birth control have to do with reducing global emissions?

Everything, women around the world would say,  because they know how closely linked reproductive health is to issues ranging from poverty and food security to climate change and beyond. This message was precisely what female leaders brought to the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, but not many were listening, least of all the Vatican.

“The only way to respond to increasing human numbers and dwindling resources is through the empowerment of women,” said Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway and former director-general of the World Health Organisation.

“It is through giving women access to education, knowledge, to paid income, independence and of course access to reproductive health services, reproductive rights, access to family planning,” she elaborated, adding that no other way existed to change the current “pattern of human consumption”.

Female leaders have long been trying to tell the world that sustainable development is not just about deforestation, climate change and carbon emissions. Equally as important to sustainable development are gender equality and human rights, which include sexual and reproductive rights.

But the reality is that globally, 215 million women who want to avoid pregnancy are not using effective methods of contraception. More than two and five pregnancies are unplanned, and approximately 287,000 girls and women die each year from pregnancy-related causes. The world has a ways to go to ensure that women have access to full reproductive rights and health.

Yet twenty years ago, the Rio earth summit saw unanimous agreement that sustainable development cannot be realised without gender equality.

So the current state of negotiations – to be fighting over something that was recognised 20 years ago – are frustrating for people like Rebecca Lefton, a policy analyst focusing on international climate change and women at the Washington, DC-based think tank Centre for American Progress, who has been following the negotiations for several months.

To the dismay of many development NGOs, the Rio+20 outcome document has no reference to women’s reproductive rights. Credit: Sujoy Dhar.

She watched the draft of the summit’s outcome text start off at 19 pages, balloon to hundreds, and then be cropped down to 49 pages. To her dismay, she found that references to women’s reproductive rights and gender equality were being scrapped.

“Women’s rights and gender equality were affirmed but not as strongly as they could be,” Lefton told TerraViva. “To some extent (they) saw a reasonable backsliding; I don’t think the text would be reopened to be revised or tweaked.”

Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), tried to sound optimistic, telling journalists, “In the first draft there was no mention to health at all, and now the entire Cairo agenda is there, which implicitly addresses reproductive rights. There are many elements we can work with.”

Even Brundtland said, “It looked quite bad some weeks ago, in the preparing process for this meeting. Not only reproductive rights, but in most paragraphs it was hard to get in women’s rights and their place in the economy to stimulate economies, and to protect (the) environment.”

“In the last week or two, this has improved,” she said. “The declaration has many weaknesses, but there are key passages on women as central partners in decision-making….All of that is better than what we had in Rio twenty years ago.”

The United States, Norway and several women’s rights organisations have fought to keep the text’s language strong, but the Holy See (the Vatican) led the opposition to remove references that ensured women’s reproductive rights.

“The result is that the final text has no reference to reproductive rights and commits to promotion rather than ensuring equal access of women to health care, education, basic services and economic opportunities,” said Lefton, adding that the Vatican equates reproductive rights and health with abortion – an inaccurate comparison, at best.

Yet female heads of state and government gathered at the Rio+20 women leader’s summit remained undaunted and pledged that the document they signed would not be lost in the “forest of declarations on gender issues”. They urged governments, civil society and the private sector to prioritise gender equality and women’s empowerment in their sustainable development efforts.

“We know from research that advancing gender equality is not just good for women, it is good for all of us. When women enjoy equal rights and opportunities, poverty, hunger and poor health decline and economic growth rises,” said Michelle Bachelet, executive director of U.N. Women.

Cate Owren, executive director of Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO), criticised the removal of references to reproductive rights from the Rio outcome document. “Political compromises for the sake of an agreement should not have cost us our rights – nor our planet,” she said.