“Slicing and separating” Occupied Palestinian Territory turning it into isolated reservations, impeding quest for statehood
Experts Examine Obstacles to Palestinian Statehood, As United Nations Meeting in Support of Middle East Peace Continues
General Assembly GA/PAL/1013 (Received from a UN Information Officer)
VIENNA, 27 June — The United Nations International Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace today heard that Israeli settlements and the related network of “slicing and separating” the Occupied Palestinian Territory, political ambiguity, and the collapse of the Palestinian private sector under the “hammer of sanctions”, were blocking attainment of Palestinian statehood.
During an examination this afternoon, wich also included the Palestinian economic and humanitarian crisis and the impact of the current situation on the Palestinian Authority, Ghassan Andoni, Director of Public Relations at Birzeit University in the West Bank and Board Member of Rapprochement, Alternative Tourism Group and Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, said that the majority of Palestinians who had previously supported the two-State solution now believed that any proposed separation under present conditions would only turn the Palestinian Territories into “isolated reservations”.
Also addressing the 22-member Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which sponsored the two-day meeting, the resident representative of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 2005, Knut Dethlefsen, stressed the importance of not getting caught up in the daily occurrences, but to look at the long term, in an effort to find a way out. Political transformation and institution-building were very important to achieve the goal of a viable and democratic Palestinian State. It was not enough to liberate a State; a State needed institutions capable of carrying it.
Asserting that civilians should not pay the price for the neglect of human rights and humanitarian obligations, the Head of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Palestine (with offices in Gaza and Ramallah), June Ray, said that, between March and May, some 90 Palestinians had been killed in conflict-related incidents in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, or three times that number last year in that period. Freedom of movement had been further curtailed at some 515 checkpoints and roadblocks, compared to some 400 at the end of 2005. Moreover, the current fiscal crisis had caused Palestinian Authority revenues to plummet in April to just one-sixth of its monthly requirement. [more]