Amnesty International USA, 27 October 2009
Amnesty International has accused Israel of denying Palestinians the right to access adequate water by maintaining total control over the shared water resources and pursuing discriminatory policies.
These unreasonably restrict the availability of water in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and prevent the Palestinians developing an effective water infrastructure there.
By Christoph Schult, Spiegel Online International, Oct 23, 2009
The cell is only a few square meters in size and there are no windows. A mattress lies on the floor; a hole in the floor for prisoners’ needs, cynically called a “Turkish toilet” is next to it.
Mohammed Othman has been held in Kishon Detention Center in northern Israel for almost a month. But neither he nor his lawyer knows exactly what he is being accused of. Othman is locked up as an administrative detainee — called Maazar Minhali in Hebrew — and is one of around 335 Palestinians currently in the same position.
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| By Max Kantar, The Palestine Chronicle, Oct 24, 2009 Earlier this week the New York Times published an op-ed article, Rights Watchdog, ‘Lost in the Mideast’ written by Robert L. Bernstein, the founding chairman emeritus of Human Rights Watch. The editorial amounts to one regurgitation of Israeli propaganda after another in an effort to delegitimize mainstream criticism of Israeli policies in the international human rights community. The timing of Bernstein’s article is instructive; its publication in the New York Times comes on the heels of the release of the Goldstone Report as the intellectual apologists for Israeli crimes in the U.S. go into ultra-hysteria mode to save the already eroding image of their favorite client state. Bernstein decries HRW for its supposed anti-Israel bias and unleashes a tirade of familiar accusations routinely invoked by ‘supporters of Israel’ to deflect criticism of the Jewish state. To make the case that HRW–and presumably the international human rights community in general—has ‘lost critical perspective’ on Israel-Palestine, Bernstein cites six major points:
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Editorial
The Guardian/UK, Oct 24, 2009
Only Amira Hass could have received the International Women’s Media Foundation lifetime achievement award by saying her life as a journalist had been a failure. By her standards maybe, but then she sets them high. If her aim is to stop successive Israeli governments lying about what they do in the occupied territories, then it is true that the language laundromat, as she once put it, keeps on turning. But make no mistake, the Haaretz columnist fully deserves this award. She is the only Israeli journalist to have lived in and reported from Gaza and Ramallah for much of the last two decades. In describing the effects of the occupation on the lives of Palestinians, she has been pilloried by Israelis and fallen foul of Hamas. Her moral anchor is firmly rooted in painful collective memories. Her mother survived a concentration camp and her father the ghettos of Romania and Ukraine. “What luck my parents are dead,” Hass wrote at the height of the Gaza operation in January. Her parents could not stand the noise of Israeli jet fighters flying over the Palestinian refugee camps in 1982, and nor could they have tolerated going about their daily chores in Tel Aviv with the knowledge of what was going on in their name in Gaza: “They knew what it meant to close people behind barbed-wire fences in a small area.” Only a Jew can invert the “never again” logic of the Holocaust that is used to justify Israel‘s least justifiable actions. It is that very experience, Hass argues, that should teach Israel to behave differently.
 DHA photo
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Peace cannot be established in the Middle East when the suffering of the Palestinians continues and the Gaza Strip remains a wreck, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Monday.
Speaking at the Istanbul Forum organized by Stratim, Seta and the German Marshall Fund, Erdoğan said the Palestinian question is at the center of all problems in the Middle East. The prime minister recalled that Turkey vocalized its disapproval of the previous year’s bombing of the Gaza Strip, adding: “We criticized steps that were serving no purpose, but which increased suffering and sabotaged the peace process. We will continue to criticize it today, too. We will criticize anything similar taking place in other areas.”
As Israeli bombs fell on the Gaza Strip during its one-sided war between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009, millions around the world took to the streets in complete and uncompromising outrage. The level of barbarity in that war, especially as it was conducted against a poor, defenseless and physically trapped nation, united people of every color, race and religion. But among those who seemed utterly unmoved, unreservedly cold were some Palestinian officials in the West Bank.
“Resuming a new phase of the peace process without proper preparation and adherence to specific terms of reference such as the roadmap, will only result in a repetition of the Annapolis process and its outcome, failure. The peace camps in Israel and Palestine had different expectations from this American administration.”
The findings and recommendations of the Goldstone report were shocking to Israelis. They were furious at the warrant for Ehud Barak’s arrest in London as a result of a court case brought by the families of the many victims of Israel’s Gaza offensive. But the decision to support the deferral of a vote on the report in the UN’s Human Rights Council has caused an earthquake in Palestinian politics.
The international communist movement slammed Tehran on Wednesday over its bloody post-election crackdown, while rejecting Western efforts to exploit the crisis as an excuse for “humanitarian intervention.”
At an extraordinary meeting in Damascus, representatives of 52 communist and workers’ parties from 43 countries around the world expressed concern about the “comprehensive political crisis” that has engulfed Iran since the June presidential elections.
Delegates from as far afield as Bolivia, Slovakia, Palestine, the US, Sudan, Iraq, Russia and Ireland condemned the theocratic authorities for arresting over 4,000 protesters and torturing detainees.
NEWS JUNKIE POST, Sep 29, 2009
A group of 13 American Rabbis and some of their congregants in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Philadelphia are fasting on the third Thursday of every month in an effort to shake the conscience of the American Jewish community about what they see as the inhuman blockade by Israel of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The group is called Jewish Fast For Gaza, and it has been gathering steam since its creation in mid-July.
Peace and Justice Post 
Israel levels Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem
October 29, 2009Israeli authorities have torn down several Palestinian houses in occupied east Jerusalem, defying international calls to halt the demolitions in the disputed city.
Gidi Schmerling, a Jerusalem municipality spokesman, said the houses in the Shuafat, Zur Baher, Silwan and Jabel Mukabar neighbourhoods were pulled down on Tuesday because they had been built illegally.
“All the houses were demolished in accordance with a court order,” he said in a statement to the AFP news agency.
Palestinians say that the municipality discriminates against them, making it virtually impossible for them to get legal permits for new homes or extensions to existing ones.
As a result, thousands of effectively illegal structures have been built in recent decades with Israel responding by destroying dozens of houses each year.
Construction crackdown
Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem, had vowed to crack down on illegal construction in the city, including east Jerusalem, whose fate is one of the thorniest issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But the United Nations on Tuesday called for an immediate halt to all forced evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes in the area, which was seized by Israel in the 1967 war.
“Such actions run counter to international law and have a serious and long-term negative impact on Palestinian families and communities,” the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement.”The UN reiterates its call for an immediate and unconditional halt to such actions and urges the state of Israel to protect the civilian population in OPT [occupied Palestinian Territories] from further displacement and dispossession.”
At least 600 Palestinians ave been displaced by eveictions and demolitions since the beginning of the year, according to OCHA, and many thousands more may be at risk.
The United States, which is seeking to revive peace talks in the long-standing dispute, called the latest demolitions “unhelpful”.
The forced evictions and demolitions have raised tensions in the eastern half of the city, which Palestinians see as the capital of any future independent state.
The situation has prompted a number of protests and Palestinians have attempted to challenge the municipality’s actions in the courts.
‘Irresponsible step’
An Israeli rights group, Ir Amim, said the demolitions were “an irresponsible step that could escalate the situation in the city and bring it to a new boiling point”.
Palestinians and human rights groups have condemned Israel’s demolition policy, accusing it of using the demolitions to shift east Jerusalem’s demographic balance.
“International bodies and the United Nations Security Council should intervene to stop Israeli authorities from carrying out these criminal actions,” Adnan al-Husseini, the Palestinian-appointed governor of Jerusalem, said.
A UN report in May showed that 1,500 demolition orders issued by the Jerusalem municipality were pending for illegal Palestinian dwellings.
The report said that if the orders were implemented, about 9,000 Palestinians would be displaced.
There are about 200,000 Jews living in East Jerusalem, alongside an estimated 250,000 Palestinians.
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Tags:evictions and demolitions, Israel, occupied East Jerusalem, Palestinians, UN call
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