Situation in the OPT/deportation – Letter from Qatar

Letter dated 12 November 1986 from the Permanent Representative of

Qatar to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General

In my capacity as Chairman of the Arab Group for the current month, I have the honour to transmit herewith seven letters from the Permanent Observer of the Palestine Liberation Organization to the United Nations, dated 3 November, 4 November (two letters), 5 November (three letters) and 6 November 1986, respectively, concerning the recent increasingly repressive measures being taken by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territories.

I should be grateful if you would arrange for this letter and the attached letters to be circulated as a document of the General Assembly, under agenda items 35 and 37, and of the Security Council.

(Signed)  Hamad Abdelaziz AL-KAWARI

Ambassador

Permanent Representative

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ANNEX

Letters dated 3, 4, 5 and 6 November 1986 from the Permanent Observer

of the Palestine Liberation Organization to the United Nations

addressed to the Secretary-General

3 November 1986

I am instructed by Yasser Ararat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to bring the following to your urgent attention.

At 0500 hours this morning, Mr. Akram Haniyyeh was arrested in his Jerusalem home and was informed that he was to be deported immediately. Mr. Haniyyeh is the editor-in-chief of the Arabic daily Al-Shaab.

Chairman Arafat calls for the immediate intervention of the good offices of the Secretary-General to stop this illegal act. We would recall that this deportation, if carried out, will be in flagrant violation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the numerous United Nations resolutions on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. It is also further proof of Israel's intention forceably to eliminate Palestinian presence from the occupied territories.

(Signed)  Zehdi Lahib TERZI

Permanent Observer

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4 November 1986

I am instructed by Yasser Ararat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to bring the following to your urgent attention.

During the evening of 3 November 1986, 50 heavily armed Israeli soldiers broke into the home of Dr. Gabi Baramki, Vice-President of Bir Zeit University. He was forceably dragged from his home and taken to the University campus where the soldiers carried out a search and seizure campaign. School books, magazines and newspapers, as well as press releases issued by the Student Council pertaining to upcoming student activities commemorating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, were confiscated in a blatant show of Israeli censorship.

Material damage to campus property is still being assessed. The soldiers then attacked the student residences and arrested scores of Palestinian students whose whereabouts are still unknown.

At the same time as the attack on Bir Zeit university campus and students, Israeli soldiers were attacking the student residences of Bethlehem University.  Thirty students were arrested and taken to Al-Fara'a prison. The home of Nimr Farid Aiwneh, President of the Student Council was broken into by Israeli soldiers who, before arresting him, ransacked and smashed his belongings. This attack on students from Bethlehem University comes in the wake of an order last week by the military commander of the area, Yahoda Brak,  that the University be closed for a week after students held a memorial service commemorating the cold-blooded massacre of 47 Palestinian villagers from Kafr Kassem by Israeli soldiers in 1956.

This informat ion is conveyed to you so that you may be kept apprised of the increasingly repressive measures being taken by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territories.

(Signed)  Zehdi Labib TERZI

Permanent Observer

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4 November 1986

I am instructed by Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to bring the following to your urgent attention.

On 19 October 1986, Khalil Yusef Ba'lousheh, 50 years old, from the occupied Palestinian Gaza Strip, was savagely stabbed in the back with a butcher knife by an Israeli attacker.  Ba'lousheh, a daily sanitation worker in Ashdod, had bent down to pick up garbage when the knife was plunged into his back. The knife lodged one centimetre from his spine, injuring a lung. The Israeli press reported that Israeli onlookers stood idle while Ba'lousheh lay in the street bleeding profusely and as his attacker ran away. To date no arrests have been made.

A second attack on two unidentified Palestinian day workers, also from the occupied Palestinian Gaza Strip, took place on 20 October 1986. Three Israelis posing as police officers stopped, searched, beat and kicked the two Palestinians, then chased after them with a knife. The police arrived while the Israelis were chasing the two Palestinian day workers. The Jerusalem Post reported the next day that one of the Israeli attackers was held only for a short time.

Racially motivated attacks against Palestinians and Palestinian property had drastically increased in the last two months, and in drawing your attention to this gravely worsening situation in the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories, I am requested to call upon your good offices to take immediate and appropriate action to put an end to this intolerable and inhuman situation.

(Signed) Zehdi Labib TERZI

Permanent Observer

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I am instructed by Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to bring the following to your immediate attention.

Israel, the occupying Power, has decided to move a potentially hazardous butane gas storage in West  Jerusalem to a Palestinian neighbourhood north of the city, in the aftermath of massive pressure from Jewish residents.

An Israeli construction company began to lay the foundation for the gas storage complex near Qalandia Palestinian refugee camps early in October, despite Palestinian opposition. Construction of the 130-ton capacity storage complex is adjacent to a Palestinian vocational school for orphans where 300 teenage orphans study. One hundred of them are year-round boarders at the Dar al-Yatim al-Arabi school.

The Palestinian village of Bir Nabala, with a population of 1,500, is less than half a kilometre away from the proposed complex. Even according to Israeli municipal laws on dangerous industrial plants, a minimum of one kilometre must be left between the industry and any residential area.

The administration of the orphanage has already requested its legal advisers to complain to Israeli occupation officials. Telegrams have already been sent complaining about the damage inflicted on the school structure by dynamite explosions used to prepare the new foundation. Several walls have been seriously cracked.

Israeli officials admit that the plant was too dangerous to keep in the Jewish residential area of Baka'a, but claim they have not been able to find a better location than next to the orphanage. They would rather see the orphanage go, they said, than look for a different site. When asked by a reporter from Al-Fajr newspaper about the dozens of Palestinian homes near the site, they said, "We have not thought about that yet."

The Jerusalem Economic Corporation, an Israeli government company, came up with the proposal to build the plant near the orphanage. A company spokesman, Nir Vites, told Al-Fajr that the site was proposed after several months of careful study. We are not sure it is the best place, but we have to relocate the plant from the Baka'a.  He went on to say, "We considered other sites but they are too far and transportation of gas to and from the city would be too costly."  When asked about the orphans whose lives would be endangered, Vites replied, "Maybe we will move the school.

It is important to mention here that since 1967 the Israeli occupation authorities have attempted on several occasions to take over the school and convert it to a military camp.  Owing to the wide support the school enjoys from the Vatican, the Federal Republic of Germany and other European countries, the Israeli occupation authorities have so far failed in their endeavours.

In bringing the above to your attention, we wish to put on record that the proposed butane storage plant could well be a potential target for Zionist settler terrorists. The consequences of such a terrorist attack would be devastating. It is a new nightmare thrust on the Palestinian population living under Israeli military occupation.

(Signed)  Zehdi Labib TERZI

Permanent Observer

*  *  *

5 November 1986

I am instructed by Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to bring the following to your attention.

At noon on 25 October 1986, a gang of approximately 30 Zionist settlers stormed the yard of the Palestinian high school in the Wad neighbourhood in Jerusalem's Old City, claiming that Palestinian students had thrown stones at them.  Furious at being prevented from entering the school building by teachers and guards, the settlers viciously attacked the teachers.  The settlers were later dispersed by police; no arrests or charges were made.

Ironically, the following day, the police summoned the school principal Abd al-Muhsin Jaber and informed him that he was being taken to court for allowing his students to "attack pedestrians".

This information is conveyed to you so that you may be kept apprised of the continuing harassment of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.

(Signed)  Zehdi Labib TERZI

Permanent Observer

*  *  *

5 November 1986

I am instructed by Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to bring the following to your attention.

Sabri Ghuraib, of Beit Ijza in the Ramallah area, has been ordered by the Israeli occupation authorities to pay a fine of 1,300 United States dollars immediately or serve a 91-day prison sentence on top of the fine. The fine was originally imposed in April of this year after the Israeli High Court turned down his appeal protesting the illegal confiscation of 112 dunums of his land. Ghuraib possesses all the necessary legal documents proving his right to this land, which the Israeli occupation authorities plan to give to the nearby Zionist Hasasha settlement.  Ghuraib refused to pay the fine, which included the Israeli prosecution's court cost and fees, and was imprisoned for 22 days before his lawyer was able to prove that the imprisonment was illegal.

The status of his home is also in question. The Israeli court had ruled that his house is built on Israeli "state land", in spite of the fact that the house, built in 1918, has all the required legal building permits from the Israeli military occupation's zoning office. A barbed wire fence has been set up all around the confiscated land, including his house, preventing Ghuraib and his family from living in it.  The new notice from an Israeli court collection agency is dated 14 September 1986 and requires him to pay the fine within a week of "receiving it", otherwise he would have to serve a 91-day sentence. The note was only delivered to Ghuraib late in October.

This information is conveyed to you so you may be kept apprised of the continuing harassment of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.

(Signed)  Zehdi Labib TERZI

Permanent Observer

*  *  *

6 November 1986

I am instructed by Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to bring the following to your attention. The information concerns house demolitions by Israel, the occupying Power, and is part of research presently being undertaken by the Data Base Project of the Human Rights Research and Education Foundation in Chicago. We are reproducing the section in full.

A case in point:  the case of Halimeh Abdal Nabi

Halimeh Abdal Nabi, a 70-year-old resident of the village of Sharafat, which will cease to exist after its last remaining house is demolished, returned to her home on 14 July 1986 to find some 150 Israeli soldiers at the site.  Long aware of intentions on the part of the military authorities to force her from her land by destroying her home, she quickly sought out her attorney, Jonathan Kuttab.  By the time she returned, however, her house had been reduced to a pile of rubble and her furniture had been dumped on someone's farm land several kilometres away.

For the past 13 years Ms. Abdal Nabi has lived in the shadow of the encroaching Israeli settlement, Gilo, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.  Gila has now absorbed the land that was owned by the Palestinian residents of the villages of Sharafat, Beit Jala and Beit Safafa, as well as part of Jerusalem. Wherever people and property have obstructed its growth, they have been forcibly removed. In the early 1970s, Ms. Abdal Nabi's family lost 40 dunums of land to roads that were built to accommodate Gilo settlers. About the same time, her kitchen and her well were destroyed.

The settlement Gilo expanded in 1976 after Palestinian vineyards and orchards were uprooted and homes were demolished to make way for it. More land was confiscated and more agricultural areas were destroyed in 1978 in order to allow for further expansion of the settlement. The absorption centre at Gilo, which provides temporary shelter for new Israeli immigrants, was extended to Ms. Abdal Nabi's doorstep. The Israeli construction company built a wall to separate her from the settlement; the wall actually cut off her access to her staircase.

Ms. Abdal Nabi experienced repeated harassment by the Israeli construction company, which hoped it could force her out of her two-room house by intimidation and harassment. Twice in the past 15 years she has been detained by the military authorities, ostensibly for her unwillingness to accommodate the settlers' desires for expansion. None the less, Ms. Abdal Nabi persistently refused to leave her home and her remaining land.

The demolition of her home has forced her to take refuge in her neighbour's home, the only Palestinian home remaining in the Sharafat area.  The Red Cross has promised her a tent, but has not yet given it to her because she has no place to put it. She has learned that the land on which her house once stood was confiscated by the military authorities in 1975. Thus she is not permitted to set up a tent there because her land has been declared a "military zone".

Recently, after much protest, the Israeli Ministry of Housing promised to compensate Ms. Abdal Nabi for her demolished home. Ms. Abdal Nabi agreed in principle to receive IS 9,000N ($60,000) in compensation. However, as soon as she agreed (thus giving up her claim to the land) , she was told that she would not receive it. In response to Attorney Kuttab's protest over this refusal to grant compensation and his statement that Ms. Abdal Nabi has been left a homeless refugee, an official at the Israeli Ministry of Housing stated, "We've done it to at least half a million …".  Ms. Abdal Nabi has been rendered homeless and dependent so that others who consider her meaningless can enjoy her property.

Ms. Abdal Nabi is still homeless. Today she is still moving around living with one Palestinian family then another. Recently she was again promised compensation, minus the cost incurred by the Israeli occupation authorities in demolishing her house.

The Palestine Liberation Organization would recall that house demolitions violate international law, which, according to article 158 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, was developed "from usages established among civilized peoples, from the laws of humanity and the dictates of the public conscience".  Israel's illegal practice of demolishing the homes of Palestinians violates the following laws and treaties:  article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949), article 13 of the Hague Convention Number IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907); articles 12 and 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolutions 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948. Not only are international laws and treaties violated, but also resolutions of the United Nations, in particular General Assembly resolution 2443 (19 December 1968); Security Council resolution 298 (25 September 1971); Security Council resolution 465 (1 March 1980); and General Assembly resolution 40/161 (16 December 1985) regarding Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the population of the occupied territories.

(Signed)  Zehdi Labib TERZI

Permanent Observer

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