Settler Sewage Ruins Palestinian Crops, Drinking Water
By Mel Frykberg | IPS | April 28, 2010
BEIT UMMAR, West Bank – Residents of this Palestinian village refuse to buy the idea that the flood of raw sewage from the adjacent Israeli settlement of Kfar Etzion, that destroyed vineyards and contaminated their drinking water, was an accident.
The Israeli Civil Administration, which administers the occupied West Bank, claims the spillage was the result of an accidental power malfunction which caused excess settlement sewage to overflow onto Palestinian land.
“This was no mistake,” says a British activist who has been documenting life in the village for several months. “The pipe was deliberately unscrewed by hand so that the sewage would spill over into Beit Ummar. That has nothing to do with an electricity cut,” he told IPS.
Villagers standing near a completely destroyed 70,000 sq m vineyard belonging to the Sabarneh family said they believe it was a deliberate act of sabotage and part of a concerted campaign by the settlers to harass their Palestinian neighbours and vandalise their property.
Beit Ummar has been the target of a number of Israeli military raids at night last month. Activists who have been organising non-violent protests against the expropriation of their land for the settlements have been arrested and the village blockaded.
In a similar incident last week the Palestinian village of Bruqin, in the northern West Bank, was flooded with sewage from the nearby Ariel settlement, causing contamination of underground water and springs and damaging crops.
These incidents are part of a larger problem of scarce water resources where a Palestinian population of 2.5 million survives on 17 percent of the West Bank’s main underground aquifer.
The remaining water is channelled towards the West Bank’s (including East Jerusalem) 500,000 Israeli settlers, and into Israel proper.
The water shortage is compounded by the lack of wastewater treatment plants and inefficient treatment of waste and sewage in the Palestinian territory which fouls its water sources.
Israeli rights group B’tselem released a study last year called ‘Foul Play: Neglect of wastewater treatment in the West Bank’.
According to the organisation, more than 90 percent of Palestinian wastewater is not treated while only 20 percent of Palestinian homes, primarily in towns and cities, are connected to sewerage systems.
Furthermore, only 81 of 121 illegal Israeli settlements are connected to wastewater treatment facilities. Over half of the settlements’ treatment plants are too small to treat waste effectively and are ill-equipped to handle the burgeoning settler population.
The result is continual technical breakdowns and sewage overflow. Most of the settlements are situated on ridges and hilltops so sewage flows down towards the Palestinian villages and towns in the valleys below, contaminating their drinking water supplies and destroying their crops.
The Israeli settlers are not affected by this as they are connected to Israel’s water supply.
The planning and building authorities in the settlements and Israeli industrial areas also ignore Jordanian building and planning laws which govern how wastewater is to be treated in the West Bank.
The B’tselem report further outlines the neglect of the territory’s water treatment plants by the Israeli Civil Administration during the decades of occupation and the current difficulties faced by Palestinian Authority (PA) water officials in trying to build new wastewater treatment plants or repair the old ones.
There is currently only one wastewater treatment plant operating in the West Bank in Ramallah. Three others have ceased to function and the PA has been unable to repair them or build new ones.
The West Bank is divided into Area A, which is under Palestinian control, Area B under joint Palestinian and Israeli control, and Area C which is under full Israeli control.
Area C comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Areas A and B are mostly built up with little free land available.
However, in order to move around or build new wastewater treatment plants in Area C Palestinian officials from the PA Environment Authority require building permits from the Israeli Civil Administration.
B’tselem and PA officials complain of the delays these officials face in getting building approval if they get them at all.
“There is an enormous amount of red tape and bureaucracy that Palestinian officials have to overcome before they get the permits,” says Eyal Hareuveni, the author of the B’tselem report.
“The Israeli Civil Administration says that the Palestinians don’t provide the necessary detailed building plans as they have been instructed but I think the administration is being deliberately difficult,” Hareuveni told IPS.
Issa Moussa from the PA’s Environmental Authority denied that the PA provided insufficient details.
“We have the case of wanting to build a new wastewater treatment plant in Tulkarem in the northern West Bank. We provided absolutely everything requested but we were still waiting for a permit,” Moussa told IPS.xxxxx
Other difficulties facing the more efficient handling of wastewater are the restrictions placed on Palestinian movement in the West Bank by the Israeli military. This has led to increased costs for donors who support wastewater projects and who in turn have cut down on their expenditure.
A Joint Water Committee between Israel and the PA was established following the Oslo Peace Accord of 1993, to address water issues.
One of the disputes between the sides is the Israeli insistence that settlement sewage be connected to future Palestinian wastewater treatment plants.
The Palestinians reject this as this implies that the settlements are permanent and say their refusal to approve this condition is one of the reasons for approval being withheld on the construction of wastewater plants.
With no higher authority to settle the disagreement the situation will only worsen in the future.
“Neither side seems to be making the urgent issue of water and waste treatment a priority,” Hareuveni told IPS.
War-Zone Medical Aid Doubly Endangered
By Paul Virgo | IPS | April 26, 2010
ROME – The case of the three Italians arrested this month on suspicion of trying to assassinate a southern Afghan governor concluded with a happy ending of sorts and a sure fire certainty – an uncompromising attitude that makes war-zone medical aid doubly dangerous.
The members of Milan-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) ‘Emergency’, inlcuding surgeon Marco Garatti, nurse Matteo Dell’Aira and logistical technician Matteo Pagani, flew back to Italy on Wednesday after being detained on Apr. 10 when their hospital in conflict-torn Helmand province was closed down after arms and explosives were found there.
But at least one of the NGO’s local staff remained in custody at the time of writing and there was no certainty about whether the hospital at Lashkar Gah would reopen and, if so, whether it would still be run by Emergency.
The accusation that members of a pacifist charity who had given up European comforts to save lives in Afghanistan were involved in a plot to kill Helmand Governor Gulab Mangal had sounded outlandish as soon as it was aired. The NGO said the bombs had been planted at the hospital, with its founder Gino Strada adding that the trio’s release showed the “attempt to discredit us has failed”.
But it was no surprise that Emergency had come under the Afghan authorities’ scrutiny. Like other medical charities such as the Red Cross, it treats wounded regardless of whose side they are on, which means Taliban fighters are among those who benefit from their care.
But unlike other NGOs in the field, it has accompanied its work in Helmand with sharp criticism of the number of civilian victims of the southern offensive against the Taliban and allegations that the United States-led international coalition was preventing the injured from reaching their hospital.
“It’s probably right to say what happened, happened because we told the story of the war,” Dell’Aira told a news conference on Friday. “This annoyed people because we told all the stories of our wounded, 40 percent of whom are children.”
Another factor that may have contributed to the NGO being targeted is that the lack of vetting of their local staff led to suspicions that their clinic served as a safe haven for insurgents.
The fact that Emergency has twice acted as a go-between for the Italian government in negotiations to release kidnapped Italian journalists also suggested that it had some form of contact with the insurgency, further raising distrust in some quarters.
“Emergency are on the radar because they’ve highlighted themselves as trouble-makers by criticising the Afghan authorities and the international alliance,” Luca La Bella, an Asia expert with the Rome-based Centro Studi Internazionali (Ce.S.I – International Studies Centre), told IPS.
“That’s not a wise thing to do. Becoming an enemy of the government is bound to endanger your operations sooner or later.”
However, the affair probably reveals more about the state of play in Afghanistan than it does about the NGO’s relations with the Afghan authorities, especially given that its operations in the rest of the country do not appear to be at threat.
The episode comes at a time when relations between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his international backers are regularly on the rocks.
Karzai has torn into the West recently saying, among other things, that its diplomats orchestrated the notorious election debacle last year that saw the Electoral Complaints Commission, the then foreign-led electoral fraud panel, throw out a third of his votes, badly hitting his standing.
During a stand-off over appointments to the panel Karzai passed a decree in February giving him the power to name all five members, angering donors. A compromise was later reached under which two foreigners were to be included with veto powers.
La Bella believes the Emergency episode is the fruit of Karzai’s desire to prove he is not a puppet of his international backers and project himself as a true national leader ahead of attempts to make peace with the insurgents.
“After being forced to back down over nominations to the Electoral Complaints Commission, Karzai had to hit back and he did so by taking things out on Emergency,” La Bella said.
“He is doing this because he needs to establish himself among Afghans, who are so proud of their independence, as a leader capable of defending national sovereignty from the overlording powers in order to find reconciliation with the insurgents. He knows he can’t have both (legitimacy at home and abroad).
“He wants to engage with the insurgents while the U.S. wants to fight on to weaken them further (before talking), by taking a stand in the south and showing the Taliban can be beaten. Karzai would rather get on with the reconciliation process now.”
Some experts also see the fact that the British military helped the Afghans seal off Emergency’s hospital as a sign that all is not well within the international alliance.
“One of my field researchers who’s just returned from Helmand said that many people he interacted with were of the opinion that the mentioned incident was a result of the internal bickering within the international community, Italian and British forces in this case,” Idrees Zaman, a researcher with Afghan research think-tank Cooperation for Peace and Unity, told IPS.
“Generally speaking, in southern Afghanistan, particularly in Helmand, lack of coordination and internal rivalries between the coalition forces is a major issue these days,’’ Zaman added.
Israeli soldiers given minor reprimands over shooting of Palestinian civilians
By Catrina Stewart | The Independent | 28 April 2010
Israeli officers held responsible for the deaths of four Palestinians in the West Bank received only minor reprimands after an internal investigation concluded that the deaths could have been avoided.
Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, Israel’s military chief, admitted that the incidents last month “could have ended differently” and could have “avoided causing harm to civilians”.
The two fatal shooting incidents, just 24 hours apart, marked the most serious escalation of tensions in the occupied West Bank in months, and threatened to destroy the fragile calm that has persisted there in recent years.
In one case, Israeli soldiers fired on Palestinian protesters, killing two. In a second incident, a soldier killed two Palestinians who he claimed had tried to attack him. Mr Ashkenazi reprimanded two senior officers – a colonel and a lieutenant colonel – and removed a squad commander from his post, a military statement said. The soldiers who fired the lethal rounds appeared to escape censure.
Israeli human rights organisations denounced the military investigation, claiming that it failed to hold the soldiers accountable for their actions and upheld the army’s culture of impunity.
“It is extremely rare for the Israeli security forces to be held accountable in cases where they have killed or injured Palestinian civilians,” said Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B’Tselem, an Israeli NGO.
She said that the army should open criminal investigations into both cases rather than conduct “internal operational debriefs” that skirt the legal issues regarding the soldiers’ actions. “There are credible allegations, these must be investigated,” she said.
On 20 March, Israeli forces faced Palestinian protesters in the village of Iraq Burin as they tried to prevent clashes with extremist Jewish settlers from nearby Bracha. In the ensuing skirmish, Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinian teenagers, Mohammed Qadus and Osaid Qadus.
The military statement said Israeli forces had been authorised to use rubber bullets against the Palestinians, but, as reported by The Independent, medics who examined the body insisted that live ammunition had been used, and produced X-rays that appeared to show a conventional bullet lodged in the skull of Osaid Qadus.
The Israeli army said a Military Police investigation into the claims that live rounds were used was still ongoing. The army “could not verify the autopsy and could therefore not confirm that the rioters were in fact hit by live rounds,” the statement said.
In Awarta a day later, an Israeli soldier fired on two Palestinians who approached a checkpoint and started “acting suspiciously,” according to the statement. The first apparently tried to attack the soldier with a bottle, prompting the soldier to shoot him. The second then allegedly wielded a “sharp object” and was also shot dead.
The soldier fired seven bullets into Mohammed Qawariq and at least three into Saleh Qawariq, according to Palestinian doctors. “While the soldier, believing his life was at risk, acted subjectively, the Chief of the General Staff holds the officers responsible for training their soldiers to act in difficult operational situations,” the military said.
Relatives of the deceased denied that they tried to attack the soldier and said they were only metal workers looking for scrap.
Hezbollah slams US over arms claims
Press TV – April 28, 2010
Hezbollah has sharply rejected US allegations about the Lebanese movement’s missiles, vowing to continue armed resistance against Israeli aggression.
Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah in an article published on Wednesday scoffed at recent comments by US Defense Minister Robert Gates that Hezbollah’s arms exceeded those held by many states in the world, saying Hezbollah’s arms did not compare to the “armament” and “crimes” of the United States and its ally Israel.
The Lebanese official recalled “the level of armament of the United States, which it used in its crimes against peoples around the world, from Hiroshima to the more than 100,000 killed in Iraq and the tens of thousands killed in Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan,” the Arabic-language newspaper As-Safir quoted him on Wednesday.
“There is a difference between arms which only serve invasions, occupations and aggressions, such as those of the United States and its ally Israel … and the arms of a resistance which defends, protects, and liberates,” he said.
“Our choice was and remains to secure all the arms of resistance that we can,” he added.
In a joint news conference with Israeli Defense Minster Ehud Barak in Washington, Gates on Tuesday accused Syria and Iran of arming Hezbollah with increasingly sophisticated rockets and missiles.
Gates’ claims came amid tensions in the Middle East intensified by Israel’s earlier accusations against Syria of providing Scud ballistic missiles for Hezbollah.
Israel views Hezbollah a major enemy, especially after the summer conflict of 2006 where the resistance forces repelled a 33-day Israeli offensive on southern Lebanon.