Category: In the Media

Apartheid wall legitimized by Israeli supreme court

Haaretz: “Court rejects petition to change route of J’lem envelope fence”

by Yuval Yoaz, November 26th

An expanded panel of nine High Court of Justice judges, headed by retired Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, on Sunday rejected petitions claiming the route of the West Bank separation fence near the village of Bir Naballah, north of Jerusalem, is illegal.

The judges said they were persuaded the route of the fence is based on security considerations rather than political motivations.

The judges noted, however, that the present petitions did not fully examine the ‘gates regime,’ under which the army has promised to operate agricultural gates that would allow farmers to pass in order to work on their lands.

“The petitioners retain the right to petition the court again if they are not satisfied by the arrangements in place,” the judges’ statement said.

The fence near Bir Naballah is part of the “Jerusalem envelope,” the section of the separation fence surrounding Jerusalem.

The “Bir Naballah enclave” was formed when the north section of the Jerusalem envelope was erected, leaving five villages – Bir Naballah, Beit Hanina, El-Jib, Al-Jadira, Qalandiyah – trapped between the fence’s route and Jerusalem’s municipal border.

The five villages have a total population of about 16,500 residents, some of whom carry Israeli identification cards.

The fence encircles the five villages, but roads are being paved to connect them to the areas of Ramallah and Beit Surik in the West Bank, in order to preserve the residents’ way of life. The roads are scheduled for completion within a month.

Three of the petitions were presented by residents of the villages, who claim the fence violates international law and goes against the High Court ruling that found parts of the fence near Beit Surik and the Alfei Menashe settlement to be illegal.

The Council for Peace and Security proposed an alternative route for the fence, but it was rejected as well.

“We don’t have the liberty of preferring the notion of security proposed by the Council for Peace and Security – we must place the military commander’s opinion at the root of our verdict,” Barak said.

“It is clear the military commander went to great efforts in planning the fence in a manner that would limit the harm to the residents of the Bir Naballah enclave as much as possible.”

Barak admitted that were the roads not being paved, the court’s decision on the Bir Naballah enclave would match its decision on the Alfei Menashe enclave, branding the fence invalid.

The petitioners claimed that the considerations behind the fence are political rather than security-minded, and that the fence’s purpose is to “annex Givat Ze’ev and the nearby Israeli communities to the jurisdiction of Jerusalem.”

The roads being paved would, in their opinion, would have “demeaning results and lead to a reality of a ruling people and a ruled people; a people driving on highways and a people imprisoned behind fences, with driving trenches and sunken roads.”

The High Court also rejected petitions by Givat Ze’ev residents and their municipality demanding that the fence be pushed farther from their territory, into the Arab villages.

Ynet: “Politics of uncertainty”

by Laila al-Hadad, November 27th,

Hope gives way to disappointment as Palestinians wait for crossing to open

My family and I are on our way back to Gaza from the US. We flew in to Cairo last week, and from there embarked on a five hour taxi ride to the border town of al-Arish, 50 km from the border with Gaza.

We rest in al-Arish for the night.

We carried false hopes the night before last, hopes transmitted down the taxi driver’s grapevine, the ones who run the Cairo-Rafah circuit, that the border would open early that morning. So we kept our bags packed, slept early to the crashing of the Mediterranean – the same ones that just a few kilometers down, crashed down on Gaza’s besieged shores.

But it is 4, then 5, then 6 AM, and the border does not open.

And my heart begins to twinge, recalling the last time I tried to cross Rafah; recalling how I could not, for 55 days; 55 days during which my son learned to lift himself up into the world, during which he took his first fleeting steps, in a land which was not ours; 55 days of aloneness and displacement.

The local convenience storeowner tells us he hears the border may open Thursday -“but you know how it is, all rumors.” No one can be certain. Even the Egyptian border officials admit that ultimately, the orders come from the Israeli side.

It’s as though they take pleasure as we languish in the uncertainty. The perpetual never-knowing. As though they intend for us to sit and think and drive ourselves crazy with thought. I call an Israeli military spokesperson, then the Ministry of Defense, who direct me back to the spokesperson’s office, and they to another two offices; I learn nothing.

As an Israeli friend put it, “uncertainty is used as part of the almost endless repertoire of occupation.”

Even the Palestinian soccer team has been unable to leave Gaza because of the Rafah closure, to attend the Asian games. No one is exempt. Peasant or pro-football player, we are equally vulnerable.

Long days

It is now our fifth day in al-Arish. Rafah Crossing has been closed more or less for more than six months, opening only occasionally to let through thousands of stranded Palestinians. And then it closes again.

Every night, it’s the same ritual. We pack all our things, sleep early, and wake up at 5 to call the border.

We’ve rented a small beachside vacation flat here. They are cheap – cheaper than Cairo, and certainly cheaper than hotels, and are usually rented out to Palestinians like us, waiting for the border to open. Its low season now, and the going rate is a mere USD 12 a night.

In the summer, when the border was closed, rates jumped to a minimum of USD 35 a night -and that’s if you could find an available flat. We can afford it. But for many Palestinians who come to Egypt for medical treatment, and without large amounts of savings, even this meager rental fee can begin to add up.

Palestinian slum

During times of extended closure, like this summer, and last year, al-Arish becomes a Palestinian slum. Thousands of penniless Palestinians, having finished their savings and never anticipating the length of the closure, end up on the streets.

In response, the Egyptian police no longer allow Palestinians driving up from Cairo past the Egyptian port city of al-Qantara if the border is closed and al-Arish becomes too crowded.

“They turn it into a ghetto. That and the Israelis didn’t want them blowing up holes in the border again to get through,” explains the taxi driver nonchalantly.

Young Palestinian men on their way to Gaza have it worse off: They are confined to the Cairo Airport or the border itself, under military escort – and only after surrendering their passports.

No one cares

We go “downtown” today – all of one street – to buy some more food. We are buying in small rations, “just in the case the border opens tomorrow.” I feel like we’ve repeated that refrain a hundred times already. I go and check my email. I feel very alone; no one cares, no one knows, no one bothers to know. This is how Palestinian refugees must feel every day of their lives.

I read the news, skimming every headline and searching for anything about Rafah. Nothing. One piece about the Palestinian soccer team; another about the European monitors renewing their posts for another six months. We do not exist.

If you are “lucky” enough to be stuck here during times of extended closure, when things get really bad – when enough Palestinians die on the border waiting, or food and money are scarce enough for the Red Cross to get involved, then maybe, maybe you’ll get a mention.

And people will remember there are human beings waiting to return home or get out and go about their daily lives and things we do in our daily lives – no matter how mundane or critical those things might be. Waiting to be possessed once again.

But now, after six months, the closure is no longer newsworthy. Such is the state of the media – what is once abhorred becomes the status quo and effectively accepted.

Sieged

It used to be that anyone with an Israeli-issued travel permit or visa could cross Rafah into Gaza – but never refugees of course. Since the Disengagement last year, all that has changed.

With few exceptions (diplomats, UN and Red Cross staff, licensed journalists) no one besides residents of Gaza carrying Israeli-issued IDs can enter Gaza now. No foreigners, no Arabs, no West Bankers, not even spouses of Gaza residents, or Palestinian refugees.

A few more days pass. They seem like years.

For Palestinians, borders are a reminder – of our vulnerability and non-belonging, of our displacement and dispossession. It is a reminder – a painful one – of homeland lost. And of what could happen if what remains is lost again. When we are lost again, the way we lose a little bit of ourselves every time we cross and we wait to cross.

We wait our entire lives, as Palestinians. If not for a border or checkpoint to open, for a permit to be issued, for an incursion to end, for a time when we don’t have to wait anymore.

So it is here, 50 kilometers from Rafah’s border, that I am reminded once again of displacement. That I have become that “displaced stranger” to quote Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. Displacement is meant to be something that happens to someone else, he says. How true. To refugees that the world cares to forget. Who have no right of return. Who return to nowhere and everywhere in their minds a million times. When the border closes, we are one day closer to become that.

Of course, that refugee is Yassine, my husband, who cannot even get as far as Egypt to feel alone. Who cannot join me and Yousuf as we journey back and forth through Rafah.

But the Palestinian never forgets his aloneness. He is always, always reminded of it on borders. That, above all, is why I hate Rafah Crossing. That is why I hate borders. They remind me that I, like all Palestinians, belong to everywhere and nowhere at once. They are the Borders of Dispossession.

We’ve packed and unpacked our bags a dozen times. My mother finally gave in and opened hers up in a gesture of frustration – or maybe, pragmatism. It seems like a bad omen, but sometimes things work in reverse here: last time we were stuck waiting for the border to open, when we decided to buy more than a daily portion of food, the border opened.

Everyone is suddenly a credible source on the closure, and eager ears will listen to whatever information they provide.

One local jeweler insisted it would open at 4 PM yesterday – a suggestion that the taxi drivers laughed off; they placed their bets on Thursday – but Thursday has come and gone, and the border is still closed.

Atiya, our taxi driver, says he heard it wouldn’t open until the Muslim pilgrimage (Hajj), a few weeks from now. We’re inclined to believe him – taxi drivers have a vested interest in providing the most reliable information; their livelihood depends on it.

In the end, “security” is all that matters and all that ever will. As Palestinians, we’ve come to despise that word: Security. It is has become a deity more sacred than life itself. In its name, even murder can become a justifiable act.

We sleep, and wake up, and wait for the phone to ring for some news. Every time we receive a knock on the door we rush to see if the messenger brings good tidings. Today? Tomorrow? A week from now?

No, it’s only the local deaf man. He remembers us from last time, offers to take out our trash for some money and food.

We sit and watch the sunset. What does it know of waiting and anticipation and disappointment and hope – a million times in one day?

Apartheid travel ban on Palestinians in Israeli cars

Three stories from Israeli and international press follow:

Haaretz: “No more hitching in the West Bank”

by Amira Hass, November 23rd

The O.C. Central Command, Yair Naveh, dropped a cluster bomb early this week. He signed an order barring Israeli citizens from taking Palestinian passengers in their Israeli vehicles within the West Bank. The order will take effect on January 19, 2007 and it exempts those who take Palestinians with permits to enter Israel and the settlements, or those who take their first-degree relatives with them.

The reason for the new order, as noted in the IDF Spokesperson’s announcement, is of course, security: to impede those who want “to perpetrate terrorist attacks on the home front of the State of Israel and in the Judea, Samaria and Jordan Valley regions.” Therefore, the order sounds like a standard IDF shell whose objective is “self-defense,” but in practice it is another component in the regime of national and ethnic separation that exists in the West Bank, a regime of privileges for the Jewish settler minority, at the expense of the Palestinians’ individual and national rights. Like other military orders and Knesset laws, which are cleverly cloaked in the guise of the security argument, this order, too, sheds cluster bombs that will continue to destroy the remaining chance of establishing Peace-relations with the Palestinians.

The security argument will satisfy the vast majority of Israelis, just as they are content with the security explanation for hundreds of road closures and dozens of military checkpoints inside the West Bank. The fact that these limit mobility to a minimum and separate between a village and its lands, one village and another, a village and the city, and from one district and another, that is, disrupt the normal life that it is still possible to maintain under the Israeli occupation regime, never deterred the army commanders who formulated the orders, never stopped the High Court of Justice judges who approved and continue to approve the orders, and it never bothered the Labor party’s MKs. Most of the Israeli public is also not troubled by the fact that it is precisely the checkpoints and roadblocks which serve the Israeli colonization policy; they are dissecting the occupied West Bank into small and disconnected enclaves where Palestinians live, surrounded by an ocean of settlement momentum and Jewish territorial contiguity.

The ban prohibiting Israelis from taking Palestinian passengers in their cars within the West Bank is part of the regime of “transportation separation” Israel has created in the West Bank. The ban complements another order that bars Palestinians with permits to enter Israel from using those crossing points from the West Bank to Israel where Israelis pass through. The Palestinians have separate crossing points. The ban is in addition to the two separate systems of roads the security establishment continues to build unhindered in the West Bank: one for the Jewish settlers and those affiliated with them (and, by accident, for the opponents of the Occupation and Israeli Arabs, as no order against their using it has been issued yet) and the other for the Palestinians. One is spacious, lit up, safe and allows for quick and brief travel. The other is narrow, exhausting, not in good shape and full of checkpoints, and makes the travel slow and time-consuming.

This is the hierarchy that is in effect embedded in “the settlement enterprise” – improved infrastructure for the Jewish residents and constant expansion and development, as opposed to decreasing the Palestinians’ space and preventing its development. The new order follows an order that already bars all Palestinians from traveling and remaining in the Jordan Valley, a third of the West Bank’s area, and the policy of “differentiation” Naveh frequently uses: the sweeping ban on all residents of the northern West Bank, or alternately those aged 16-35, from traveling south, within the West Bank. This theft of time and space from the Palestinians is vital for ensuring that “their separate development” will always lag behind Jewish development, will always flounder on the brink of a weak, inferior and degrading existence.

The new order will not hinder “terrorist elements” from linking up with car thieves with good knowledge of the country’s hidden paths, who infiltrate into the West Bank in stolen Israeli vehicles; it will not stop them from attaching stolen Israeli license plates to their cars, forging documents, dressing up as Israelis or abducting Israelis. The real aim of the order is to attack civilian targets, targets of peace. The ban on Israelis taking Palestinians in their cars affects the rights of Israelis (Jews and non-Jews) who have Palestinian friends: they won’t be able to travel together in the West Bank, visit friends together, to help them get to the doctor, their home or their olive groves more quickly.

The ban affects all the determined Israeli groups working against the occupation: Mahsom Watch, Yesh Din, Activists against the Separation Fence, Rabbis for Human Rights, Ta’ayush, the Committee Against House Demolitions. It also affects human rights groups such as Hamoked – the Center for the Defense of the Individual, B’Tselem, and the Association for Civil Rights. Activists from all the above organizations and movements meet with Palestinians, travel with them and build up friendships with them. In their meetings and joint travels on the roads of the West Bank, they serve as a reminder to the Palestinians that there are Israelis who are not soldiers and settlers, that there are Israelis who oppose the regime of privileges and that therefore, there is perhaps hope for a fair political solution.

Naveh’s order, if it is not rescinded in time, leaves behind countless little cluster bombs that will detonate and damage this hope as well.

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International Herald Tribune: “Human rights lawyers asking military to rescind latest ban on Palestinian travel”

by Associated Press

RAMALLAH, West Bank: Israeli human rights lawyers said Thursday they have asked the military to overturn the latest restriction on Palestinian movement — a ban on Palestinians riding in cars with Israeli license plates in the West Bank.

The army has cited security reasons for the ban, which is to go into effect in January.

However, human rights activists said the order is part of a wider Israeli scheme to create separate road systems for Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank and to keep Palestinians from 20 percent of the territory. The restrictions will also hamper the work of humanitarian organizations in the Palestinian territories, the activists said.

“This is a part of a network of orders that creates the physical and legal reality of separation between ethnic groups present in the West Bank,” lawyer Michael Sfard wrote on behalf of the Israeli rights group Yesh Din to Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz. “This is exactly how apartheid is defined.”

Cars owned by Israelis and West Bank Palestinians have different plates, black on yellow and green on white, respectively. West Bankers have always been barred from driving cars with Israel plates, but until now could ride in them as passengers. Under the new order, that would be forbidden, even in the West Bank.

The army said in a statement that militant groups have exploited travel in Israeli cars to carry out attacks in Israel and against Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The military refused to elaborate.

Exempt from the ban will be Palestinian medical staff, those with permits to work in Israel, Palestinians who work for international organizations and first degree Palestinian relatives of Israelis riding in the same car, the army said. Others would have to apply for permits.

Yesh Din, a watchdog group tracking settler violence against Palestinians, is expected to challenge the ban in Israel’s Supreme Court.

The group said its work will suffer because the travel ban will make it much harder for Palestinians to file complaints against settlers with police, at a time when many area already frightened to do so.

Lior Yavneh, research director of the group, said that last year, 299 Palestinians filed complaints at Israeli police stations in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Many reached the police stations by riding with rights workers in Israeli cars to reach the settlements that are usually off-limits to Palestinians.

Charles Clayton, national director of World Vision, an aid group that helps about 200,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, also objected to the ban, saying it would keep apart Israeli and Palestinian staff, as well as hundreds of Palestinian volunteers, who routinely travel together to help develop small businesses and agricultural projects.

“Humanitarian work is not about treating people as some sort of distant customer. These are people we have to deal with and meet with and help. How can we do that at arms length?” he asked.

Palestinians can apply for the relevant permits, but receiving them is far from automatic and requires a time-consuming and nerve-racking process, according to those who have tried the system.

Most aid groups prefer to use Israeli vehicles to move in the West Bank because Palestinian vehicles are often held up at roadblocks, doubling and tripling travel time.

Palestinian motorists are already banned from or are unable to reach more than three dozen roads and road sections in the West Bank, according to a 2004 report by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem.

“It’s all done in an incremental way, which in the grand scheme of things creates an alternative road system for Palestinians,” said Sarit Michaeli, the B’tselem spokeswoman.

The military has also restricted Palestinian access to about 20 percent of West Bank territory, including areas near Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank and much of the Jordan Valley.

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Haaretz: “Travel ban on Palestinians in Israeli cars limited to Green Line”

by Amira Hass, November 26th

The ban on allowing Palestinians to ride in Israeli cars in the West Bank will mainly be enforced near the border with Israel, and not throughout the West Bank, a senior Israel Defense Forces officer told Haaretz.

The officer said that he himself gives rides to Palestinians, and that he personally would not bother enforcing the rule as long as it is clear that the ride was “ordinary” and that the destination was not inside Israel.

The officer acknowledged that the ban, instituted by GOC Central Command Yair Naveh, does not “sound good,” but insisted that it was meant primarily to prevent illegal Palestinian entrants from being smuggled into Israel in Israeli cars, whose occupants are usually checked less carefully.

The order was issued, he said, to foil a trick that Israelis who smuggle Palestinians into Israel have discovered in order to evade the prohibition on doing so: Because many checkpoints are not built exactly on the Green Line (which separates Israel from the West Bank), these Israelis could take their Palestinian passengers through the checkpoints and then let them off a few hundred meters later – still in Palestinian territory, but with easy access to Israel – without breaking any laws.

However, the Yesh Din organization has asked Defense Minister Amir Peretz to overturn the rule, arguing that it, like several other orders approved by Naveh, creates a legal mechanism of separation on the basis of national origin in the West Bank. As a result, they said, it is clearly illegal, and “constitutes an international crime, the crime of apartheid.”

A statement abut the new policy issued by the IDF Spokesman’s Office last week said it was intended to fight terror rather than merely reduce the number of illegal entrants.

The senior officer explained that the order was clearly aimed at this as well, but that the number of illegal entrants seeking work is much greater than the number of terrorists.

Haaretz: Military probe ordered in 2003 shooting of American in Nablus

by Yuval Yoaz, November 26th

The Military Advocate General, Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit, has instructed military police investigators to open a probe into the question of whether Israel Defense Force soldiers bear criminal responsibility in the shooting of a 24-year-old American citizen and leftist activist in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2003.

The investigation was opened almost two years after Brian Avery, of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), petitioned the High Court of Justice for a criminal probe in his case, and after both Mandelblit and his predecessor, Major General (res.) Menachem Finkelstein, refused to order such a probe, arguing that the military investigation after the incident should suffice.

Avery, from New Mexico, came to Jenin as part of his work with the ISM in April 2003. He extended humanitarian aid to local residents, among other things, assisting doctors treating the residents. On Saturday April 5, Avery and his flatmate, Jan Tobias Carlson, heard shooting. When the shooting stopped, the two called other activists and went to find out if anyone had been injured. According to testimony by ISM members present at the scene, Avery was standing under a streetlight and wearing a red vest with the words “doctor” on it in English and Hebrew on front and back. Four eye-witnesses said an IDF armored personnel carrier (APC) and a tank came into the street, and Avery and his companions raised their hands to show they were unarmed. The witnesses said the APC and the tank continued to approach Avery and when they were a few dozen meters away, the APC opened fire and shot about 30 bullets. Avery was hit in the face, his cheek was torn, and his eye-socket, mouth and jaw bones were smashed.

The IDF probe stated there was no proof the shooting had been by IDF soldiers.

In the petition, Avery’s attorney, Michael Sfard, said an operational investigation by the IDF was “not a reliable tool,” adding that “in a number of cases soldiers have been cleared, while the military police investigation revealed incriminating evidence and resulted in harsh indictments.”

Three months ago the High Court ordered the military advocate general to show cause why he would not open a criminal investigation into the incident.

The state responded last Thursday that the chief military prosecutor saw no reason to change the previous decision. However to remove any doubt, he decided to order a military police investigation.

The state also agreed to pay Avery’s court costs of NIS 15,000.

Sfard said “it is unfortunate that it takes three and a half years and pressure of the High Court justices for the military advocate general to order what is fair and desirable in a place where human life is not worthless. There are a few soldiers who were involved in the incident and thought the story was over. The message from the High Court is that the story is not over. Brian and I will continue to fight until the truth comes out,” Sfard said

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See also our press release into the previous Supreme Court hearing on September 20th and the resulting instruction of the Court to the IOF.

Amnesty International: “Israel: Fear for Safety”

23 November 2006, PUBLIC AI Index: MDE 15/092/2006 — UA 315/06 Fear for safety

URGENT ACTION, ISRAEL/OT: Human rights defenders in the Occupied Territories

Human rights defenders working in the Occupied Territories are at risk of attack by Israeli settlers. Amnesty International is concerned at the latest such attack against those who seek through their presence to afford protection to Palestinians and to bear witness to the abuses perpetrated against them by Israeli settlers in the area.

On 18 November, Tove Johannsson, a 19-year old Swedish human rights defender, was assaulted by Israeli settlers as she accompanied Palestinian school children through an Israeli army checkpoint near the Tel Rumeida Israeli settlement in the West Bank city of Hebron.

The attack against Tove Johannsson, a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a solidarity group of peace activists, was witnessed and documented by several other international human rights defenders. They reported that the group was surrounded by up to 100 Israeli settlers who spat at them, kicked and shoved them, while Israeli soldiers standing at the checkpoint nearby took no action to prevent the attack.

Tove Johannsson was then hit in the face with a broken bottle by an Israeli settler, and sustained a broken cheekbone and a fracture near her eye. Her colleagues reported that as she fell to the ground, a group of settlers who were watching the attack clapped and cheered and some tried to take photos of themselves next to her bleeding face, giving the camera a ‘thumbs-up’ sign.

According to the ISM, one of the human rights defenders who witnessed the attack identified three of the assailants to the police but, after detaining them briefly, police released the three settlers, and threatened to arrest the remaining human rights activists if they did not leave the area immediately. Tove Johannsson filed a complaint with the Israeli police and her colleagues
gave witness statements, but none of the assailants are known to have been arrested. On 21 November, the Swedish Foreign Ministry expressed concern over the assault.

This latest attack is one of many perpetrated by Israeli settlers against international human rights defenders in recent months and years, seemingly in an attempt to discourage and eliminate the presence of international witnesses, thereby depriving the local Palestinian population of this limited form of protection.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

In August 2006, a Swedish and an Austrian national working for the international organization, the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT), were attacked by Israeli settlers in the Southern Hebron Hills area as they accompanied Palestinian shepherds to their land near Israeli settlements. CPT members have worked in the Hebron area for several years accompanying farmers to their land and monitoring the conduct of Israeli settlers in the area, and have themselves been frequently attacked by Israeli settlers. Amnesty International delegates were also assaulted and beaten with wooden clubs by Israeli settlers in the Southern Hebron Hills area in October 2004, as they were investigating repeated attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian children from isolated villages on their way to and from school.

No investigations are known to have been carried out into the complaints lodged with the Israeli police by Amnesty International delegates and by dozens of International human rights defenders who have been attacked by Israeli settlers in recent years. The same is true for the complaints lodged by Palestinian victims of settlers’ attacks. The impunity enjoyed by the settlers responsible for such attacks has in turn encouraged further attacks.

A detailed study published earlier this year by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din – Volunteers for Human Rights, which seeks to promote law enforcement in cases of settlers’ violence, found that 90 percent of complaints filed with the Israeli police against Israeli settlers’ attacks were closed without indictments being issued; and that in the rare cases when assailants were indicted and convicted for such attacks, the sentencing was not commensurate with the nature of the attacks (see: http://www.yesh-din.org/site/index.php?page=report&lang=en )

Amnesty International has repeatedly called on the Israeli authorities to remove Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, which are illegal under international law.