councilor.org
| Source | Jim Devine |
| Date | 03/10/11/01:10 |
| UN expert Jean Ziegler has documented how Israeli policies are preventing
Palestinians from having food and water, and thus causing a catastrophic humanitarian situation. His report was prepared for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, to be presented at the UN General Assembly next month. Now Israel and the U.S. are seeking to block this report, and Israel is even demanding that Ziegler be "disciplined"! Below are two articles; one dealing with Ziegler's findings, the next with Israel's blocking reaction. UN Expert reports on Israel's Starvation Policy Compiled by Alaqsaintifada.org from AP and Aljazeerah reports - Sept. 18, 2003 A UN human rights expert is preparing to submit a report to the UN General Assembly that charges Israel of triggering a "humanitarian catastrophe" in the Palestinian territories, newspaper reports said yesterday. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, said in a draft report that the Israeli military is preventing Palestinians reaching food and water with restrictions on movement in the territories, according to Swiss newspaper Le Temps and news agency ATS. "There is a permanent, grave violation of the right to food by the occupying forces. There is a catastrophic humanitarian situation, and really it is absurd," said Jean Ziegler, UN special expert on the right to food. Ziegler, a Swiss university professor, visited the occupied Palestinian territories in July and spent 10 days there to gather material for a report to the UN General Assembly. Palestinian villages are circled by troops, preventing food deliveries from getting in and farmers from reaching their fields, he said. Many villages are forced to buy their water because their previous sources have been cut off. Ziegler also cited the destruction or confiscation of fertile Palestinian land for military zones or Jewish colonies. "We saw thousands of olive trees destroyed by bulldozers," he said. Trucks of food sent to Palestinian villages either as aid or for sale are stopped at roadblocks and unloaded. Villagers must find another truck to load the food again after inspection and complete the journey. "The economy is in ruins," he said. "Markets don't function, peasants don't go to the field, and they are humiliated in a very, very shocking way," Ziegler said. More than half of Palestinian families eat only once a day, "they are reduced to begging" by Israeli military action, and Israel is breaching international law by failing to provide much-needed aid, he said. According to the World Bank, almost one child in 10 in Gaza and the West Bank is suffering from severe malnutrition, and 15 percent of children aged below 5 are acutely anemic, preventing brain cells from developing normally. Ziegler said that a future Palestinian state should not be "cut up into separate 'bantustans'" - a reference to all-black enclaves in apartheid South Africa with limited autonomy - and called on Israel to end "obstruction of humanitarian relief services". "The humanitarian catastrophe that is emerging in the Occupied Territories must be reversed," the Swiss sociologist and UN expert was quoted as saying in the draft. "There can be no justification for harsh internal closures that prevent people from having access to food and water, otherwise the imposition of such military measures are amounting to what has been called a 'policy of starvation'. Provoking hunger and malnutrition as a side effect of security measures is totally unacceptable and disproportionate and constitutes collective punishment", the draft said. Israel Accused of Starving West Bank By Charles Laurence and Kim Willsher - Gulf News / The Telegraph, Oct. 5, 2003 A United Nations report which blames Israel for causing starvation in Gaza and the West Bank has prompted a furious diplomatic row with the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon. The leaked report by Jean Ziegler, a Swiss sociologist and UN special envoy, blames Israel's security policies for "collective punishment" of the Palestinians. Ziegler spent 10 days in the occupied territories in July and was due to present his report to the UN General Assembly in New York on November 18. Furious Israeli officials, however, have denounced the report as "highly political", saying that Ziegler had gone beyond his mandate. With support from American diplomats at the UN, Israel has called for the report to be rejected before it reaches the floor of the Assembly, and asked the UN Human Rights Commission, for whom Ziegler was working as a food rights specialist, to discipline him. According to newspaper reports in France, Ziegler's report will not now be published until the spring. Tuvia Israeli, Israel's deputy representative to the UN, said: "Ziegler's behaviour has been a bitter blow to our relations with the UN which were already extremely strained." He said that Ziegler's silence about the rampant corruption at the heart of the Palestinian Authority was unacceptable. Privately, UN officials in Geneva, where the Human Rights Commission is based, also expressed frustration at having "wasted a golden opportunity" to improve cooperation with the Israeli government. They regretted that Ziegler had been "carried away by his indignation". Ziegler appeared yesterday ready to lock horns with the UN. "It is a very explosive report about the silent tragedy behind the visible tragedy of the Palestinian territories," he said. In the 25-page report, a copy of which has been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Ziegler says 22 per cent of Palestinian children under the age of five suffer severe malnutrition, and most families have only one meal a day. He describes that as "absurd" in a historically fertile land, blaming the "apartheid" security fence, the seizing and destruction of Palestinian farmland, and roadblocks for preventing food from reaching Palestinian communities. "The Occupied Palestinian Territories is on the verge of humanitarian catastrophe as a result of the extremely harsh military measures imposed by the occupying Israeli military forces since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000," the report warns. Ziegler became one of the first UN envoys to be allowed to report on conditions in the occupied territories with co-operation and assistance from Israel. Israel wants the report to be dismissed on technical grounds, claiming that Ziegler breached protocol because the report was leaked to the French newspaper, Liberation, before their government had a chance to lodge a reaction. Ziegler defended his report yesterday as "the truth" and said the leak had been beyond his control. He said that the draft report had been sent to Israeli agencies that had helped his research at the same time as it was submitted to the Human Rights Commission. |
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