PARIS, 16 May 2007 — Israel is flouting international law and reshaping Jerusalem at the expense of the Palestinians of the occupied territories, according to a leaked Red Cross report quoted in a newspaper yesterday.
The Jewish state shows “general disregard” for its obligations under international humanitarian law and the law of occupation in particular, said the document by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which was leaked to the New York Times.
The report came a day before Israel marks 40 years since it conquered and annexed Arab East Jerusalem.
It said Israel was using its rights as an occupying power under international law “in order to further its own interests or those of its own population to the detriment of the population of the occupied territory,” which it says is “foreign to the letter and spirit of occupation law.” Its policies in East Jerusalem are “reshaping the development of the Jerusalem metropolitan area” with “far-reaching humanitarian consequences,” the Red Cross report was quoted as saying by the New York Times.
These consequences include the isolation of Palestinians living in Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, problems of access to basic services and a “condition of artificial illegality” in which thousands of Palestinians live in Jerusalem without the ability to get permanent residency.
With the construction of a wall, the building of an outer ring of Jewish settlements and of a road network linking Israeli neighborhoods and settlements in and outside Jerusalem, the report concludes, Israel is consolidating “a Greater Jerusalem Envelope” that fragments Palestinian communities and severs East Jerusalem from the West Bank.
An ICRC spokesman in Geneva told AFP that the quotations published in the New York Times were from a confidential report submitted in February 2007 to the Israeli authorities and a small number of other governments.
The report considers all land that Israel conquered in the 1967 war to be occupied territory under international law and does not recognize Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, said the Times.
Israel’s unilateral moves in Jerusalem have been condemned by UN Security Council resolutions, including one in 1980 that resulted in 13 Jerusalem-based foreign embassies being moved to Tel Aviv.
Palestinians are determined to make East Jerusalem, which includes the walled Old City and its holy sites, the capital of a future state.
