Israel-Palestine: For Human Values in the Absence of a Just Peace | Page 25
Israel-Palestine: For Human Values in the Absence of a Just Peace
More than five million Palestinian refugees are registered with the United Nations Relief
and Works Agency (UNRWA. Most of them currently reside in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria,
Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.lii Palestinians refugees from the 1967
War are not registered with UNRWA. Some Palestinians were internally displaced
around 1948 within what is now Israel and made Israeli citizens, but Israeli law has not
allowed them to return to their homes and lands. Other Palestinians, some of whom were
already refugees, have been internally displaced within the occupied Palestinian territory
since 1967. liii
Table 2: Palestinians, Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)
Millions, as of end 2014
Total Palestinians
Refugees
From 1949
From 1967
From other conflicts
IDP in West Bank
IDP within Israel
12.1
8.0
6.1
1.1
0.8
0.34
0.38
Source: http://www.unrwa.org/who-we-are. Accessed 19 September 2015.
The parties involved have never reached agreement on any of the proposals for
resolving the plight of Palestinian refugees, including compensation, repatriation to
homes and lands in what is now Israel, and resettlement to third countries. All these
options have been broached, but none has been adopted. Complicating the situation, the
two United Nations agencies that support Palestinian refugees are overwhelmed and
underfunded.liv Any durable peace agreement is likely to remain elusive as long as the
historic claims and contemporary realities of Palestinian refugees remain unaddressed.
Settlements
Since 1967 Israelis have created numerous settlements in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza) with 547,000 settlers
as of the end of 2013.lv Israeli settlements are illegal under international humanitarian law
(the Fourth Geneva Convention, article 49), which prohibits occupying powers from
colonizing, exploiting natural resources or building infrastructure for their own use.
There is a good reason for this prohibition, as the settlements endanger the lives of
civilian populations, both the occupied and those settling in occupied territory. Many
observers, including the study team and some Israeli officials, see the settlements as
precluding the creation of a viable Palestinian state in what are now the OPT. The
locations of the settlements and their infrastructure—highways, checkpoints, and the
separation wall—thwart travel between Palestinian population centers in different parcels
of Area A, described above.
For instance, the Tent of Nations farm, owned by a Christian Palestinian family
whose deed to the hilltop tract of land goes back over a century, has been surrounded by
five settlements. It has been fighting in the courts for 12 years against the efforts of the
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