Western countries tout support for a two-state solution but exert little pressure over expanding settlements.
The Canadian government has announced it will impose sanctions on four Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank as settler violence against Palestinians surges during Israel’s war in Gaza.
In a press release on Thursday, Canada’s Global Affairs ministry said it was sanctioning Israeli settlers for the first time over “violent and destabilizing” actions against Palestinians.
“Attacks by extremist Israeli settlers – a long-standing source of tension and conflict in the region – have escalated alarmingly in recent months,” the ministry said. “This has undermined the human rights of Palestinians, prospects for a 2-state solution and posed significant risks to regional security.”
The settlers targeted are David Chai Chasdai, Yinon Levi, Zvi Bar Yosef and Moshe Sharvit. The ministry said all four have engaged directly or indirectly in violence against Palestinian civilians and property.
The sanctions were announced as impatience with Israel’s refusal to curb settler attacks grows among Western countries that have long touted their support for a two-state solution but imposed few consequences for the constant expansion of Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land in the West Bank. Those settlements are illegal under international law.
In February, the United States announced that it would sanction a handful of Israeli settlers, including Chasdai and Levi, over attacks on Palestinians.
The move allowed for the possibility of a wider US campaign to exert pressure on the settler movement, but President Joe Biden’s administration has kept the sanctions narrowly focused on a handful of individuals for the time being.
The US has resisted calls to sanction far-right Israeli ministers, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but even more limited sanctions against settlers have been met with ire from Israeli officials.
Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, settler attacks against Palestinians have surged to new heights, often under the gaze of Israeli forces who have taken few steps against the perpetrators.
This week, a group of Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian truck driver in the West Bank under the mistaken assumption that he was delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza.
According to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, which has said Israel’s policies in the occupied territory constitute the crime of apartheid, only 3 percent of investigations into attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians – many of which go unreported – have resulted in convictions.
That apathy is unsurprising to Palestinians, who see right-wing settlers and Israeli state policies as two iterations of a shared enterprise of displacing Palestinians and promoting Jewish settlement in the occupied territory.
On October 19, Sarah Mahamid watched helplessly from a window as Israeli security forces shot her younger brother.
Taha, 15, had been playing with a friend outside their house in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem.
The 19-year-old screamed as her brother fell to the ground.
Their father, Ibrahim, ran out of the front door to get his son, but a sniper shot him too.
“I remember hearing my father shout that Taha might be alive, … but I knew that Taha was martyred. I knew he was dead,” Sarah told Al Jazeera.
Taha was killed instantly. Ibrahim fought for his life for five months in intensive care until he also died.
Footage seen by Al Jazeera shows Taha and Ibrahim were both unarmed and posed no threat.
“My other brother ran after my father out the door to stop him. He saw that Taha was dead, and he saw my father get shot.
“It seemed like steam or smoke was rising from my father’s body as the bullets hit him.”
Taha Mahamid, left, and his father Ibrahim, right, were shot and killed outside their home by Israeli forces during a raid in Tulkarem [Courtesy of Sarah Mahamid]
Unlawful, random killings
Nearly 1,500 Palestinians have been unlawfully killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank in the past 16 years – 98 percent of them civilians, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Each of them, like Taha and Ibrahim, has a story and loved ones who mourn them.
The frequency of the killings have spiked in recent years with Israel killing 509 Palestinians in 2023. That is more than double the number recorded by OCHA in any previous year.
In the first three months of this year, 131 Palestinians were killed, a higher rate of killing than the previous year, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
“Israel has a decades-long pattern of using lethal force against Palestinians, … but it seems that the Israeli government is taking even further steps in that regard,” said Omar Shakir, the Israel-Palestine director at HRW.
Israel says its operations in the West Bank are necessary for security reasons. It cites the same justification for its assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed 35,000 Palestinians in response to the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which killed 1,139 people.
The killings in the West Bank are carried out during home raids or during stops and harassment at Israeli checkpoints.
Some Palestinian children have even been killed on their way to school, according to HRW.
“[The Israelis] are firing at people who don’t pose an imminent threat to life. They are also firing at people who are fleeing and at people who are injured and lying on the ground. Some of these trends have existed before, but it appears these incidents are happening more frequently,” Shakir told Al Jazeera.
Shoot to kill
Israeli officials have for years backed a shoot-to-kill policy regardless of whether the Palestinians being shot posed a threat. Israel has even authorised its army to shoot at stone throwers and has handed out assault rifles to Israeli Jews living in illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Settlers killed 17-year-old Omar Abdel Ghani Hamid when they attacked his village in the West Bank on April 13. Omar was one of several young men who had confronted the settlers to stop them from beating up Palestinians and attacking their homes.
Omar’s father, Ahmed, said his son and his friends scared the settlers away even though they were not carrying weapons. However, one of the settlers returned with a pistol and shot Omar.
“The bullet went through the right side of his head and out the left. He died immediately. Thank God he didn’t suffer much pain,” Ahmed said.
Ahmed learned about Omar’s death via a WhatsApp group that all the villagers use to notify each other of settler attacks. Later that morning, his son was pronounced dead at a hospital.
Omar Abdel Ghani Hamid, 17, was killed by an Israeli settler in April [Courtesy of Ahmed Abdel Ghani Hamid]
Ahmed said he is searching for justice but Jewish Israelis are almost never held accountable by the Israeli authorities.
From 2017 to 2021, less than 1 percent of all legal complaints that Palestinians filed against Israeli soldiers, including for extrajudicial killings, led to prosecutions, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din said.
In that time, only three Israeli soldiers were convicted of killing Palestinians and were given lenient sentences. Others were ordered to complete “military community service” for killing Palestinians, it said.
“There is a culture where Israeli units know that they can carry out grave abuses without being held accountable for their abuses,” Shakir from HRW said.
‘Colonising our minds’
Army raids and extrajudicial killings are part of a broader attempt to keep Palestinians in the West Bank “afraid”, said Zaid Shuabi, analyst and activist with the Palestinian rights group Al-Haq.
But it has ultimately led to the formation of a new generation of armed groups, often established by young people who are fed up with the occupation’s transgressions.
Israel’s response to this new wave of resistance has been to target entire communities to crush the morale of Palestinians, Shuabi said.
“They want to reshape the Palestinian mind into thinking that we shouldn’t even dare to resist. And if we do, then we will pay a high price,” he told Al Jazeera.
“This is about intimidating us. They want to put us down … and to colonise our minds.”
Sarah believes that was the purpose behind the Israeli attack on her family. She said that while her father and brother bled to death on the street, Israeli soldiers entered her house.
The Israeli army then cut off the water and electricity to their home. At one point, one of the Israeli soldiers began beating Sarah’s other brother with the butt of his rifle, telling him to keep silent.
Moments before the soldiers left, Sarah mustered up the courage to ask why they terrorised her family.
“He said, ‘To scare you,’” Sarah told Al Jazeera. “I couldn’t believe it. I wondered what was wrong with them.
“They killed my brother and my father just to scare me.”
More than a million Palestinians are sheltering in the southern Gaza city after being displaced by Israeli attacks.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says only the United States could stop Israel from attacking the border city of Rafah in Gaza, adding that the assault, which he expects within days, could force much of the Palestinian population to flee the enclave.
“We call on the United States of America to ask Israel to not carry on the Rafah attack. America is the only country able to prevent Israel from committing this crime,” Abbas told a special meeting of the World Economic Forum in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Sunday.
Israel, which has threatened for weeks to launch an all-out assault on the city, saying its goal is to destroy Hamas’s remaining battalions there, stepped up air attacks on Rafah last week.
Western countries, including Israel’s closest ally the US, have pleaded with it to hold back from attacking the southern city, which abuts the Egyptian border and is sheltering more than a million Palestinians who fled Israel’s seven-month-long assault on much of the rest of Gaza.
Abbas said that even a “small strike” on Rafah would force the Palestinian population to flee Gaza.
“The biggest catastrophe in the Palestinian people’s history would then happen,” he said.
Abbas reiterated that he rejects the displacement of Palestinians into Jordan and Egypt and said he is concerned that once Israel completes its operations in Gaza, it will then attempt to force the Palestinian population out of the occupied West Bank and into Jordan.
Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi, reporting from Ramallah, said that Abbas’s remarks were significant as it was the first time a senior leader in the PA made such a statement, but added that the Palestinians expect more from the leader of the PA.
“Abbas is simply echoing the things that the Palestinians we have been speaking to said for the last six months,” he said.
“The reaction to Abbas’s remarks on the Palestinian streets is likely to mirror a broader political response. The people we have been speaking to say that what they see is a speech from their leader, far too late and far too weak.”
Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas led an attack on southern Israel on October 7 in which Israel said 1,139 people were killed and 253 taken captive.
More than 34,400 Palestinians have since been killed, according to the Gaza health ministry, and most of the population is displaced.
Hundreds of thousands of people sheltering in Rafah have nowhere to flee in the face of Israel’s offensive that has levelled large swaths of the urban landscape in the rest of the territory.
United Nations officials and human rights groups warn that an attack on Rafah will be catastrophic.
Every year, April 17 marks Palestinian Prisoner’s Day, a day dedicated to the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Campaigners use the day to call for the human rights of such prisoners to be upheld and for those who have been detained without charge to be released.
On Monday, Israel released 150 Palestinian prisoners detained during the war in the Gaza Strip. These prisoners, including two Palestine Red Crescent Society workers, said they suffered abuse during their 50 days in Israeli prison, according to a report by the Reuters news agency.
Here’s more about Palestinian Prisoner’s Day and the situation of the prisoners in Israel.
What is Palestinian Prisoner’s Day?
The Palestinian National Council chose April 17 as Palestinian Prisoner’s Day in 1974 because it was the date that Mahmoud Bakr Hijazi was released in the first prisoner exchange between Israel and Palestine in 1971.
Hijazi, who had been serving a 30-year prison sentence on charges of trying to blow up the Nehusha Water Institute in central Israel in 1965, was released by Israel in exchange for a 59-year-old Israeli guard named Shmuel Rozenvasser.
How many Palestinians are in Israeli prisons and how are they treated?
In the occupied Palestinian territories, one in every five Palestinians has been arrested and charged at some point. This rate is twice as high for Palestinian men as it is for women – two in every five men have been arrested and charged.
There are 19 prisons in Israel and one inside the occupied West Bank that hold Palestinian prisoners. Israel stopped allowing independent humanitarian organisations to visit Israeli prisons in October, so it is hard to know the numbers and conditions of people being held there.
As of Tuesday, about 9,500 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank were in Israeli captivity, according to estimates from Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a rights group based in the West Bank city of Ramallah that supports Palestinian prisoners. The organisation works with human rights groups and families of prisoners to gather information about the situation of the prisoners.
Palestinian prisoners who have been released have reported being beaten and humiliated before and after the start of the war on Gaza on October 7.
Prisoners released into Gaza on Monday have complained of ill-treatment in Israeli prisons, according to the Reuters report. Many of those released said they had been beaten while in custody and had not been provided with medical treatment.
“I went into jail with two legs, and I returned with one leg,” Sufian Abu Salah told Reuters by phone from a hospital in Gaza, adding that he had no medical history of chronic diseases.
“I had inflammations in my leg, and they [the Israelis] refused to take me to hospital. A week later, the inflammations spread and became gangrene. They took me to hospital where I had the surgery,” said Abu Salah, adding that he had also been beaten by his Israeli captors.
Permission for family members of prisoners to visit them has been suspended since the outbreak of COVID-19 in Gaza and since December 2020 in the West Bank, according to HaMoked, a human rights NGO assisting Palestinians subjected to human rights violations under the Israeli occupation. HaMoked added that minors being held in prisons were allowed a 10-minute phone call to their families once every two weeks during 2020.
(Al Jazeera)
How many Palestinian prisoners are being held without charge?
About 3,660 Palestinians being held in Israel are under administrative detention, according to Addameer. An administrative detainee is someone held in prison without charge or trial.
Neither the administrative detainees, who include women and children, nor their lawyers are allowed to see the “secret evidence” that Israeli forces say form the basis for their arrests. These people have been arrested by the military for renewable periods of time, meaning the arrest duration is indefinite and could last for many years. The administrative detainees include 41 children and 12 women, according to Addameer.
(Al Jazeera)
Why are Palestinian children held in Israeli prisons?
According to Addameer, 80 women and 200 children are currently being held in Israeli prisons.
In 2016, Israel introduced a new law allowing children between the ages of 12 and 14 to be held criminally responsible, meaning they can be tried in court as adults and be given prison sentences. Previously, only those 14 or older could be sentenced to prison. Prison sentences cannot begin until the child reaches the age of 14, however [PDF].
This new law, which was passed on August 2, 2016, by the Israeli Knesset, enables Israeli authorities “to imprison a minor convicted of serious crimes such as murder, attempted murder or manslaughter even if he or she is under the age of 14”, according to a Knesset statement at the time the law was introduced.
This change was made after Ahmed Manasra was arrested in 2015 in occupied East Jerusalem at the age of 13. He was charged with attempted murder and sentenced to 12 years in prison after the new law had come into effect and, crucially, after his 14th birthday. Later, his sentence was commuted to nine years on appeal.
What sort of trials do Palestinians receive?
Controversially, Palestinian prisoners are tried and sentenced in military courts rather than civil courts.
International law permits Israel to use military courts in the territory that it occupies.
A dual legal system exists in Palestine, under which Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are subject to Israeli civil law while Palestinians are subject to Israeli military law in military courts run by Israeli soldiers and officers.
How long have some Palestinians been in Israeli captivity?
Some Palestinian prisoners have been held in Israeli prisons for more than three decades.
These are people who were arrested before the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 between then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzakh Rabin, who was assassinated by an ultra-nationalist Israeli in 1995 who opposed the negotiations, and Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. These pre-Oslo prisoners are called “deans of prisoners” by Palestinians, according to the website of Samidoun, an international network of organisers and activists advocating for Palestinian prisoners.
Al Jazeera could not independently verify the current number of pre-Oslo prisoners in Israeli prisons.
On April 7, the prominent Palestinian prisoner, activist and novelist Walid Daqqa died at Israel’s Shamir Medical Center. Daqqa had been arrested in 1968 for killing an Israeli soldier and remained in prison for 38 years before his death. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 2021. Despite pressure from rights groups to release Daqqa on medical grounds, Israel refused to free him.
Walid Daqqa,🇵🇸 prisoner battling cancer,has died in an Israeli Hosp. Despite international & Palestinian calls for his release due to severe medical neglect in prison, he remained detained until his death. Daqqa leaves behind a legacy as a 🇵🇸 hero, survived by his wife & daughter pic.twitter.com/liBBnFBVtM
Prominent Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti – who was the co-founder of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, also known as Fatah, the party that governs the West Bank – has been in prison for 22 years. In February, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, announced that Barghouti had been placed in solitary confinement in February.
Dozens of settlers stormed villages, setting fire to homes in search for missing teenager.
A Palestinian man has been killed in an attack by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, where tensions remain high amid fears of more violence.
Dozens of settlers stormed the village of al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, killing one Palestinian and wounding at least 25 people after a 14-year-old Israeli settler went missing.
The attacks that started on Friday with several Palestinian homes also set on fire were continuing on Saturday, when at least four Palestinians were wounded in the village of Duma and another person in al-Mughayyir.
In Duma, several homes and cars were set ablaze as Israeli forces looked on, locals told Al Jazeera.
The Israeli army said the body of the missing teenager had been found, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday condemning the “heinous murder” and “grave crime”.
Reporting from Abu Falah, north of Ramallah, Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim said at least 40 vehicles and homes were destroyed in the attack.
There are fears that more Palestinian homes could be targeted, reported Ibrahim, who witnessed several settlers still roaming the Palestinian village and at least two nearby Palestinian communities.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid criticised “violent riots” by settlers in the occupied West Bank and urged the country’s leadership to intervene to avoid more killing.
“The violent riots of the settlers are a dangerous violation of the law, and they interfere with the security forces operating in the area,” Lapid posted on X.
Netanyahu and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir “should stop the lawlessness on the ground before more blood is spilled”, Lapid added.
[Al Jazeera]
‘Lack of accountability’
Raids by Israeli settlers and soldiers against occupied West Bank towns and villages have increased since the outbreak of the war on Gaza on October 7, killing hundreds of Palestinians.
Ibrahim reported that “settler attacks have been increasing and 2023 has been the highest on record when it comes to attacks by settlers against Palestinians”.
She noted that “already this year, we’ve been seeing the attacks from three per day to four per day. Palestinians say that the lack of accountability gives settlers the impunity to continue the attacks”.
Near Ein Siniya village in Ramallah, resident Abed Abu Awwad told Al Jazeera on Saturday that settlers blocked a road and threw stones at his car, which smashed a window.
Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim said that Israeli forces had set up a checkpoint preventing cars from going to al-Mughayyir and surrounding villages.
The Israeli army, which earlier said it had found the teenager’s body, posted on X that “security forces are continuing the pursuit after those suspected of carrying out the attack”.
Reporting from occupied East Jerusalem, Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan said that Israeli army raids across the occupied West Bank have been taking place on a near-nightly basis in multiple locations.
“This is a strategy Israeli authorities have deliberately put in place in the occupied West Bank – they say they’re going after Hamas targets and anybody who is a fighter, but we’re seeing more and more Palestinian civilians being arrested and we see a lot more violence taking place within those areas,” Khan said.
The United States and United Kingdom have announced sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of committing human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Rights groups have accused the military of failing to halt settler violence or punish soldiers for wrongdoing.
The settlers are Israeli citizens who live on private Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The settlements are illegal under international law.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s announcement comes despite international pressure against Israel’s building of illegal settlements.
Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has declared 800 hectares (1,977 acres) in the occupied West Bank as state land, in a move that will facilitate the use of the ground for settlement building.
The announcement on Friday came as United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Smotrich underlined the government’s determination to press ahead with settlement building in the West Bank, despite growing international opposition.
“While there are those in Israel and in the world who seek to undermine our right to Judea and Samaria and the country in general, we promote settlement through hard work and in a strategic manner all over the country,” Smotrich said, using Biblical names for the area of the West Bank that are commonly employed in Israel.
The denomination of the land in the Jordan Valley as state land follows a similar designation of 300 hectares (740 acres) in the Maale Adumim area of the West Bank, which the Palestinians want as the core of a future independent state.
The US said last month that Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank was inconsistent with international law, signalling a return to longstanding US policy that had been reversed by the previous administration of Donald Trump.
The change brought the US back into line with most of the world, which considers the settlements built on Palestinian territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war to be illegal. Israel itself disputes this view, citing the Jewish people’s historical and Biblical ties to the land.
Earlier this month, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said, “The establishment and continuing expansion of settlements amount to … a war crime under international law.”
‘Complicity and cover’
Palestinian authorities condemned the land seizure and expansion of settlements.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the latest move a “crime” that is part of an “official policy racing against time to annex the West Bank and eliminate the possibility of creating a Palestinian state”.
“There are no morals, values, principles or international resolutions that can stop the extremist right,” the ministry said in a statement.
“The international failure to protect our people is complicity and cover for Israel’s ongoing evasion of punishment,” it added.
Smotrich, the influential leader of one of the hard-right pro-settler parties in Netanyahu’s coalition, himself lives in a settlement and has consistently backed settlement building.
Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now said the announced seizure is the single largest since the 1993 Oslo Accords, and “2024 marks a peak in the extent of declarations of state land”.
Peace Now called the timing of the announcement a “provocation” as it came during the visit by Blinken, who has been critical of settlement expansion by Netanyahu’s government.
International pressure for a resumption of efforts to reach a two-state solution, with an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, has grown amid efforts to end the nearly six-month war in Gaza.
Little progress has been made in achieving Palestinian statehood since the signing of the Oslo Accords. Among the obstacles impeding it are expanding Israeli settlements.
The move comes as the Palestinian Authority faces pressure to reform from the US amid Israel’s war on Gaza.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has appointed his longtime economic adviser Mohammed Mustafa to be the next prime minister in the face of US pressure to reform the Palestinian Authority as part of Washington’s post-war vision for Gaza.
Mustafa, a US-educated economist and political independent, now faces the task of forming a new government for the PA, which has limited powers in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
In a statement announcing the appointment on Thursday, Abbas asked Mustafa to put together plans to re-unify administration in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, lead reforms in the government, security services and economy and fight corruption.
Mustafa replaces former Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh who, along with his government, resigned in February citing the need for change amid Israel’s war on Gaza and escalating violence in the occupied West Bank.
The internationally recognised PA, which is dominated by the Fatah party, exercises limited self-rule in the occupied West Bank, but lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007.
Aims to reunify governance of Palestinian lands after face major obstacles, including strong opposition from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and a devastating war that is still grinding on with no end in sight.
Fatah and Hamas are expected to meet in Moscow this week for talks.
Mustafa, 69, has held senior positions at the World Bank and previously served as deputy prime minister and economy minister.
In 2015, Abbas appointed Mustafa as the chairman of the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF), which has nearly $1bn in assets and funds projects across the occupied Palestinian territory.
He served as a deputy prime minister responsible for economic affairs from 2013 to 2014, when he led a committee tasked with rebuilding Gaza after the seven-week war in which more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed.
Speaking at Davos in January, Mustafa said the “catastrophe and humanitarian impact” of Israel’s continuing war on Gaza was much greater than a decade ago.
At least 31,341 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7, most of its 2.3 million population have been displaced and are in desperate need of aid, and swaths of the enclave now lie in rubble.
Biden administration officials have urged Abbas to bring new blood, including technocrats and economic specialists, into a revamped PA to help govern post-war Gaza.
But it is unclear whether the appointment of a new cabinet led by a close Abbas ally would be sufficient to meet US demands for reform, as the 88-year-old president would remain in overall control.
Israel, meanwhile, has said it will never cooperate with any Palestinian government that refuses to reject Hamas and its October 7 attack on southern Israel.
Mustafa, in his Davos remarks, described the October 7 attack as “unfortunate for everybody”.
“But it’s also a symptom of a bigger problem … that the Palestinian people have been suffering for 75 years non-stop,” he said.
“Until today, we still believe that statehood for Palestinians is the way forward, so we hope that this time around we will be able to achieve that, so that all people in the region can live in security and peace.”
Aida, Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – Among the children playing on the street in the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank is 10-year-old Ahmad Damaseh who dreams of becoming a doctor when he grows up.
He belongs to the fourth generation of the Damaseh family to live in this refugee camp since his ancestors fled the Nakba from the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Deir Aban 75 years ago as some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes to make way for the creation of the state of Israel.
Central to Damaseh’s dream is a United Nations agency that has provided for Palestinian refugees in occupied Palestinian territory and neighbouring nations since then.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) provided the Damaseh family with their very first tent in Aida.
It is responsible for 702 schools providing education to 500,000 children and students, according to Anwar Hammam, deputy head of the PLO’s Refugee Affairs Department. It provides aid to 400,000 people living in the Aida refugee camp.
At the heart of UNRWA’s mission is the idea that it would support displaced Palestinians until they could return to their homes, something Israel has denied generations of Palestinians.
Israel has also set its sights on UNRWA, which is now on the verge of collapse as funding is withdrawn and more news headlines imply that Israel and the United States want to end its mandate.
Ahmad Damaseh, 10, \dreams of being a doctor but the loss of UNRWA services like schools may mean an end to those dreams [Monjed Jadou/Al Jazeera]
After the Israeli government accused the organisation of having links to those responsible for attacks by the Qassam Brigades and other armed Palestinian fighters on southern Israel on October 7, many large donors and donor nations – who together provide more than 80 percent of UNRWA’s funding – have withdrawn their financial support.
Only a handful of countries, including Belgium, Norway, Ireland and Saudi Arabia, have pledged to continue funding. The largest donors, including the US, United Kingdom, Germany and Spain, have suspended funding altogether.
For now, residents of Aida say, their dreams are on hold and possibly gone forever.
‘No one else can manage the camps’
Aida refugee camp, located between Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Jerusalem, is home to more than 8,000 Palestinian refugees, two schools for boys and girls and a clinic serving refugees from all the camps near Bethlehem.
For seven-and-a-half decades, four generations of the Damaseh family have held onto the hope of returning to their original village.
Children in the Aida refugee camp return home from the UNRWA school they attend [Monjed Jadou/Al Jazeera]
The Damasehs have relied on UNRWA for food, healthcare and education through the years since the Nakba. Now, they are terrified of what will become of them if the agency is forced to cease all operations in the near future, as it has warned might happen.
“There is no Palestinian or international entity capable of assuming the responsibility for the camps, neither in education nor in health,” said Ahmad’s father, Muhammad. Like others in the community, he strongly believed the cessation of funding to UNRWA is part of a larger plot against Palestinians.
“As refugees, we know there is a major political plan to end UNRWA’s existence, preventing the right of return. This is something we will not allow. My son, Ahmed, will study in Aida camp school until he returns to our original village,” he added defiantly.
If UNRWA disappears, they said, so does the dream of ever returning home. Instead, it is likely that these camps will be absorbed as towns under the wider Palestinian Authority.
The entrance to the UNRWA-run Aida camp school. UNRWA operates 702 schools for 500,000 children and students across the occupied Palestinian territory [Monjed Jadou/Al Jazeera]
While Ahmad’s father is particularly concerned about the future of his son’s education – and what that means for his dreams to study medicine – his grandmother, 70-year-old Haleema Damaseh worries about healthcare services.
Even before the war in Gaza began last October, services offered by UNRWA clinics had been shrinking, with only medical treatment and prescriptions for chronic conditions available, said Muhammad. Even that will stop if UNRWA can no longer operate.
His mother, Haleema, told Al Jazeera, “The UNRWA clinic has stopped providing diabetes medication, among others, which I need. So, my son buys it for nearly $100 a month.”
She feared this would not be sustainable for the longer term, especially with the severe economic crisis in the occupied West Bank which has taken hold due to the crackdown on the occupied Palestinian territories since the war began.
This crackdown has taken the form of multiple roadblocks throughout the occupied West Bank, raids on camps and towns and a strict curfew on residents. Employment has plummeted and prices have soared, while the Palestinian Authority is struggling to pay salaries to public employees.
‘Palestinians will fight against losing UNRWA.’ Saeed Al-Azaha works for the PLO’s Refugee Affairs Department and warns of rising tensions if UNRWA services are halted [Monjed Jadou/Al Jazeera]
‘Palestinians will take a stand’
Saeed al-Azha, the head of the Popular Committee for Services in Aida, part of the Refugee Affairs Department of the PLO, explained that the camps have been raided often, with incursions and arrests increasing recently, exacerbating conditions for Palestinian refugees.
He warned that conditions would only deteriorate further if funding to UNRWA operations were suspended.
“Palestinian refugees will fight against losing UNRWA,” he said. “They will take a stand in all five regions where the agency works – Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, in addition to the occupied West Bank.
“UNRWA holds political significance as a witness to the Nakba and as an UN-mandated agency that no Palestinian wants to lose before refugees get their right of return to their homes from which they were displaced in 1948.”
UNRWA Operations Director in the West Bank Region Adam Pollock told Al Jazeera that the removal of UNRWA and its services “would be a recipe for escalating tensions, especially considering that the youth population in the camps exceeds 30 percent”.
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This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
