Forwarding from PenL
Joanna
--------
Some very depressing news...
>> 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.
Jim D.