Christian Aid Report Warns Israeli Settlements and Barrier Undermine Palestinian State

Christian Aid, a UK-based aid agency, said on Thursday that without urgent international intervention, generations of Palestinians and Israelis face a future of crippling poverty and relentless insecurity.

The agency’s report, *Facts on the Ground*, explains how Israel is taking more land from the occupied West Bank for Jewish settler roads and settlements. Israeli settlements currently occupy 42 percent of the West Bank.

According to Christian Aid, poverty and unemployment are rising, malnutrition and anaemia are mounting, and farmers are being prevented from tilling their land. Farmers kept from their own fields show how people with the least power often bear the heaviest cost (Psalm 82:3).

Israelis-only roads and highways criss-cross Palestinian territory, intersecting villages in the West Bank and cutting the Gaza Strip in three. Unable to get their goods to market or travel to work, Palestinians are seeing their economy strangled and their future vanishing before their eyes, the aid agency says. It adds that the separation barrier surrounding large parts of the West Bank is the starkest sign yet of Israel’s politics of separation. Palestinians have no freedom of movement between its two sides except through Israeli-controlled military checkpoints.

The report says Israel has steadily built and then expanded settlements on land it has occupied since 1967, in violation of international law. It cites an announcement in August 2004 that another thousand homes were to be built in the West Bank as a sign of the impunity with which Israel operates. “These settlements have all but destroyed the possibility of a viable Palestinian state,” the report says.

Christian Aid argues that a two-state solution would allow Palestinians to tackle the endemic poverty that permeates the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It would also offer Palestinians and Israelis the security and sovereignty that both peoples urgently need.

The agency describes an increasing culture of violence, marked by suicide bombings, overwhelming military force in civilian areas and wanton destruction, that threatens people in the region and beyond. “But the policies of separation and division which we see today are heightening, not solving, the conflict,” the report states.

Christian Aid says the UK, Irish and EU governments have a legal obligation under international law to hold Israel to account for its actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In particular, the agency recommends that Jewish settlements and their infrastructure be dismantled, and that construction of the separation barrier around the West Bank be halted.

Source: Read the original report