Palestine Monitor
Under the Oslo agreement, Israel’s military rules 60% of the West Bank, but offers little protection for the area’s majority Arab citizens. The result is lawlessness where tribal justice has supplanted official security. ST McNeil reports.
The need for clan justice is evident in the West Bank’s largest city, Hebron (Al Khalil).
Known as the occupation’s laboratory, the city is split like the larger West Bank between zones of Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israeli influence called H1 and H2, respectively. The Israeli-controlled eastern H2 is where 35,000 Palestinians live underneath 800 Jewish settlers. Sunlight filters to the alleys of the city centre through suspended sacks of waste caught in trash nets: faeces, stones and refuse thrown from settler apartments.
“What was once the vibrant heart of Hebron has become a ghost town” announced Israeli human rights group B’Tselem in their 2007 report. Nearly 40% of H2’s Palestinian population has left because of the violence, crime and degradation.
The Fourth Geneva Convention requires the occupying Israeli army to police H2 for every residents’ safety. But soldiers are under orders to protect just the small Jewish population, according to soldier testimony collected by Israeli veteran’s group Breaking the Silence. “The Israelis are here for settlers,” said a Hebron sheikh, an elder who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They see criminals with guns and they don’t do anything.”
While Israelis don’t help H2’s Palestinian citizens, the PA isn’t allowed to police the neighbourhood. Under the Oslo Accords from 1993, Palestinian security can’t enter H2’s anarchy - but they do. In brown jumpsuits, policemen sneak in to surprise and overwhelm suspects, said a PA official. Often the criminals are armed and dangerous, but the Palestinians are required to enforce the law as municipality inspectors without guns. “A lot of crime happens because the PA cannot go there and solve these problems,” said the sheikh. “The absence of the PA made these problems bigger.”
More at: http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article1562
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