Palestine West Bank Access Restrictions Map | November 2024 & Maps showing Israeli made checkpoints & barriers on Palestinian land

 West Bank Access Restrictions Map | November 2024

https://www.ochaopt.org/content/west-bank-access-restrictions-map-november-2024

Interactive map - checkpoints & barriers

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/d0f8132285e74a73b5c1d6d1ac4f655c/

Occupied Palestinian territory

Millions of Palestinians struggle to live with dignity under Israeli occupation, facing coercive practices and Palestinian political divisions.

https://www.ochaopt.org/

Israeli CHECKPOINTS & barriers restricting Palestinian movement 2023 OCHA MAP

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Who are the settlers? As many as 700,000 Israeli settlers are living illegally in the occupied West Bank as settler violence surges.

Settlers are Israeli citizens who live on private Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The vast majority of the settlements have been built either entirely or partially on private Palestinian land.

More than 700,000 settlers – 10 percent of Israel’s nearly 7 million population – now live in 150 settlements and 128 outposts dotting the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

A settlement is authorised by the Israeli government while an outpost is built without government authorisation. Outposts can range from a small shanty of a few people to a community of up to 400 people.

Some of the settlers move to the occupied territories for religious reasons while others are drawn by a relatively lower cost of living and financial incentives offered by the government. Ultraorthodox Jews form one-third of all settlers.

A plurality of Israeli Jews who live in the West Bank say that the construction of settlements improves the security of the country, according to the Pew Research Center. The argument is that settlements act as a buffer for Israel’s national security as they restrict the movement of Palestinians and undermine the viability of a Palestinian state. However, some on the Israeli left argue that the settlement expansion hurts the two-state solution and thereby Israel’s own prospects for peace.

When were the first settlements built?

Israel started building settlements just after capturing the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the June 1967 Six-Day War.

In September 1967, the Etzion Bloc in Hebron was the first settlement built in the occupied West Bank. The settlement now hosts 40,000 people.

Kfar Etzion, one of the oldest settlements, houses around 1,000 people while the largest – Modi’in Illit – has around 82,000 settlers, most of them ultraorthodox Jews.

Successive Israeli governments have pursued this policy leading to a rise in settler population in the occupied territories.

About 40 percent of the occupied West Bank land is now controlled by settlements. These settlements — along with a vast network of checkpoints for Palestinians — effectively separate the Palestinian parts of the West Bank from each other, making the prospect of a future contiguous state almost impossible, according to critics.... READ MORE

Israel/OPT/Palestine: Law to ban UNRWA amounts to criminalization of humanitarian aid

© EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images

 

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https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/israel-opt-law-to-ban-unrwa-amounts-to-criminalization-of-humanitarian-aid/

Reacting to the news that the Israeli parliament has passed a law to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating inside Israel, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, said:  

“This unconscionable law is an outright attack on the rights of Palestinian refugees. It is clearly designed to make it impossible for the agency to operate in the Occupied Palestinian Territory by forcing the closure of the UNRWA headquarters in East Jerusalem and ending visas for its staff. It amounts to the criminalization of humanitarian aid and will worsen an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

“UNRWA has played an indispensable role in offering, food, water, medical aid, education and shelter to the nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza who have been forcibly displaced, subjected to an engineered famine, and stand at serious risk of genocide as a result of Israel’s relentless offensive in the last 12 months. This law flies in the face of the International Court of Justice order to Israel to ensure sufficient humanitarian assistance and facilitate basic services.

“UNRWA has been a lifeline for Palestinian refugees in the occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank and in neighbouring countries throughout the 75 years since its foundation. The plight of the Palestinian people would be even more severe if not for UNRWA’s tireless work over the last three quarters of a century.

“This appalling, inhumane law will only exacerbate the suffering of Palestinians, who have endured unimaginable hardship and whose need for global support is greater than ever. The international community must be quick to condemn it in the strongest possible terms and exert any influence they have on the Israeli government to repeal it.”

Background

Founded in 1949, the UNRWA is a UN agency that supports the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees. It is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions from UN Member States.  

UNRWA has defined Palestine refugees as “persons whose regular place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”

At a time when Israel, the occupying power, continues to flagrantly violate its obligations vis-à-vis Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, UNRWA has long served as a sole lifeline, offering indispensable humanitarian aid, education and shelter. The agency also provides desperately needed aid for millions of other Palestinian refugees living in neighbouring Arab countries.

In January 2024 over a dozen states and the European Union announced the suspension of funding to UNRWA, following allegations that individual staff members were involved in the 7 October attacks carried out by Hamas and other armed groups in southern Israel. UNRWA immediately dismissed nine employees over the allegations at the time.

Almost all of the states that had previously suspended funding for UNRWA have since reinstated their financial support, aside from the United States, where funding remains frozen until at least March 2025.

Israel's real, undeclared goal has always been to make Gaza uninhabitable and destroy as many traces of Palestinian life as possible

 

Gaza, Palestine 2024

Occupied by Israel

Occupied by Israel

The Intercept: Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”

Amid the internal battle over the New York Times’s coverage of Israel’s war, top editors handed down a set of directives. 

The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.

The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees... READ MORE   https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/

Related

Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows

The analysis found that, as of November 24, the New York Times had described Israeli deaths as a “massacre” on 53 occasions and those of Palestinians just once. The ratio for the use of “slaughter” was 22 to 1, even as the documented number of Palestinians killed climbed to around 15,000.

The latest Palestinian death toll estimate stands at more than 33,000, including at least 15,000 children — likely undercounts due to Gaza’s collapsed health infrastructure and missing persons, many of whom are believed to have died in the rubble left by Israel’s attacks over the past six months... READ MORE https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-israel-palestine-bias-new-york-times/

Read our complete coverage 

Israel’s War on Gaza

Israel’s 2023 bombings and invasion of the Gaza Strip have cost thousands of Palestinian lives and displaced countless others. But the war didn’t start with Hamas’s October 7 attack. The Intercept’s coverage delves into Israel’s occupation, how the U.S. government enables its repression, and the free speech fight over pro-Palestine activism at home. https://theintercept.com/collections/israel-palestine/

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