GENEVA, 18 June 2003 — The Red Cross yesterday urged Israel to ease its blockade of the West Bank, saying it was driving Palestinian civilians into long-term poverty and violating their rights.
“The ongoing violence and the stringent security measures maintained by the Israeli authorities have left many Palestinians in dire need,” the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement.
“The measures they have imposed in the occupied Palestinian territories over the past two years run contrary to the basic rights of the population of those territories,” the statement added.
It urged the Israeli authorities “to meet their legitimate security needs in a manner that complies with international humanitarian law” by minimizing the impact of security measures on Palestinian civilians.
“We emphasize that we understand the concerns of the Israeli authorities for the safety of their civilians but this should not exclude access of Palestinians to food and to work,” ICRC spokeswoman Tamara Rifai told AFP.
Restrictions on movement in the West Bank, destruction of land and property, cases of blocked access to health care and basic services had continued “and in some instances become more severe”, according to the ICRC.
The appeal came as the ICRC decided to extend a one-year emergency program totaling $8.6 million (7.3 million euros) to give food vouchers to families in the West Bank, a method which is not used by the relief and protection agency anywhere else in the world.
An independent study commissioned by the ICRC had shown that 60 to 70 percent of families in the West Bank live below the poverty line and there are strong signs the Palestinians are shifting from a short-term economic crisis to a “longer term economic breakdown”.
Meanwhile, the mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, was being questioned by Israeli police yesterday as part of an investigation into Israeli-Arab Islamists, police said in Jerusalem.
“Sheikh Ekrima Sabri is being questioned in the course of this investigation,” police spokesman Ofer Sivan told AFP, but would not provide further details.
Fourteen members of the country’s Islamic Movement, including its leader Sheikh Raed Salah, a former mayor of Umm El-Fahm, were arrested last month in a massive swoop in northern Israel on suspicion of laundering money for the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
Israeli Internal Security Minister Tzachi Hanegbi has not ruled out a ban on the Islamic Movement, which is represented in parliament by two MPs and controls the local government in five Israeli towns. The Islamic Movement, founded in the 1970s, is split in two factions, a radical “northern” one led by Salah and a more moderate “southern” faction led by founder Sheikh Abdallah Nimr Darwish.
In another development, a week after a botched Israeli assassination attempt, Hamas leader Abdul-Aziz Al-Rantissi is back at home as defiant as ever.
Rantissi, 55, continues to live openly in a third-story apartment in Gaza City, where he reaffirmed in an interview yesterday the movement’s rejection of a ceasefire with Israel.
“Calling on Hamas and other Palestinian groups to cease fire and end resistance is a call in the wrong direction,” Rantissi said as Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas pursued talks with militants on ending their attacks on Israelis. “They must call on the Zionist enemy to stop its aggression against the Palestinian people,” Rantissi said.
Rantissi, an Egyptian-trained pediatrician, insists that Hamas’ “fighters exert maximum effort to avoid harming civilians”, a statement that jars with the reality of commuters being blown up by its bombers on Israeli city buses.
When Hamas speaks of civilians, it excludes the 200,000 Jewish settlers on occupied land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, whom it views as legitimate targets.
Rantissi said Hamas was ready to stop attacks inside Israel...”if they release all prisoners, end incursions, end siege, house demolitions and massacres of children, women and elderly”.
“I still carry the marks of missile shrapnel on my body. I am not afraid,” said Rantissi, who leapt clear of his jeep as five helicopter-fired Hellfire missiles homed in on June 10. His son was also wounded. An aide and woman passerby were killed.
