OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 3 December 2003 — Israel’s Arab minority has suffered increasing official discrimination and poverty over the past two years amid the continuing Palestinian uprising, an advocacy group said in a study published yesterday. Israeli-Arab families have much higher poverty and infant mortality rates than other Israelis, according to Mossawa, an advocacy center for Arabs and Palestinians.
It said development budgets for Israeli-Arab areas were lower than other communities, while nine Israeli-Arab babies died for every 1,000 births compared with four of every thousand for the others. It said that just four percent of the government’s urban development budget went toward the Israeli-Arab community, even though they represent more than 18 percent of the population.
Some 60 percent of Israeli-Arab children and 44.7 percent of Israeli-Arab families live below the poverty line, it said. It added that 76,000 Bedouins live in areas not recognized by the government and not entitled to basic services.
Last December, an inquiry into October 2000 riots in Arab areas of Israel which claimed the lives of 12 Israeli Arabs and a Palestinian found they were partly due to “the government handling of the Arab sector (which) has been primarily neglectful and discriminatory.” The riots started as violent protests in support of the Palestinian intifada, which broke out a few days before and has escalated into a low-intensity conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 3,600 people on both sides.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian accused of masterminding the intifada, Marwan Barghouti, has been refused access to a doctor by Israeli prison authorities despite declining health, campaigners for his freedom said yesterday.
The 44-year-old leader of the mainstream Fatah movement in the West Bank is suffering from back, throat and stomach problems as a result of being held in “cramped, humid and isolated conditions”, according to the Campaign to Free Marwan Barghouti. “The prison administration has refused to authorize a doctor to examine and treat him despite repeated demands,” the group.
The association said that Barghouti had been kept in solitary confinement for the past 11 months and forbidden from receiving visitors since his arrest in April 2002. But a spokesman for the prison service told AFP, “Mr. Barghouti’s health is satisfactory”, and added that he had been treated for “minor problems”.
A prison doctor had examined Barghouti’s chest last week, the spokesman said, denying charges by the association that he had been handcuffed during daily exercises. Barghouti is standing trial on charges of murdering or abetting the killings of 26 people, as well as heading the militant Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a largely autonomous and radical offshoot of Fatah.
In another development, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak held talks in Cairo yesterday with US Middle East envoy William Burns about “the latest developments in the Palestinian territories and Iraq,” a source close to Mubarak said.
The source said Mubarak and Burns had discussed “efforts made to implement the roadmap and ways to eliminate obstacles blocking its implementation.”
US President George W. Bush held summits in Egypt and Jordan in June to launch the road map which calls for creating a Palestinian state by 2005 that will live in peace alongside Israel, but new violence has stalled the plan.
Burns also briefed Mubarak about “the results of his meeting with Palestinian prime minister (Ahmed Qorei) in Jordan” on Saturday, which also focused on the conflict with Israel, the source said.
The Mubarak-Burns meeting followed the launch in Switzerland of a new unofficial peace initiative drafted by Israeli opposition politicians and prominent Palestinians.
