The head of the UN agency for Palestinian
refugees launched a scathing attack today on a new Israeli plan for a
system of checkpoint terminals across the occupied West Bank.
{josquote}”An
insidious new regime to limit freedom of movement is threatening to
further stifle economic activity and smother social interaction between
villages and towns in the West Bank”{/josquote}
Karen
AbuZayd, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said Israeli
authorities had told them of plans to install six specially built
terminals to check people and cargo, including aid deliveries.
She said it would hamper the agency’s work and dramatically raise costs.
“An
insidious new regime to limit freedom of movement is threatening to
further stifle economic activity and smother social interaction between
villages and towns in the West Bank,” AbuZayd said today at a meeting
of UNRWA donors in Amman, Jordan.
The
new checkpoint policy comes at a time when Israel and the Palestinians
are engaged in a new round of talks ahead of a summit expected next
week in Annapolis, in the US, which is intended to restart peace
negotiations.
Under the new system, UNRWA expects the annual cost
of transporting and delivering aid to treble from $220,000 (£110,000)
this year to $720,000 next year.
The agency provides food, clothing, education and healthcare to around 4.5 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East.
Currently
the agency’s goods are checked by Israeli customs when they arrive at
the Israeli port of Ashdod and are then delivered directly to the West
Bank.
Negotiations between the UN and Israel on the new system
are still under way. However, AbuZayd said she expected in future that
all aid coming in containers from Ashdod would have to be unloaded at
West Bank checkpoints and the aid packed on to pallets and reloaded
into trucks on the Palestinian side – a “back-to-back” system like that
in force at Gaza’s commercial crossings.
At the moment the aid
can pass through 12 crossing points from Israel to the West Bank, but
this will be reduced to six along the West Bank barrier, the UN has
been told.
“It is obvious that these new procedures will result
in loss of time and an exponential increase in costs,” AbuZayd said.
There are already 563 obstacles in the West Bank, from permanent
checkpoints to earth mounds, according to the UN.
Under the new
proposals, AbuZayd said the movement of her staff would also be
severely affected. UNRWA is the largest employer in the Palestinian
territories, with 4,800 Palestinian staff in the West Bank and another
10,000 in Gaza.
She said there were “indications” that staff
would need special permits to enter Palestinian land between the
pre-1967 war Green Line and Israel’s new West Bank barrier, a stretch
of land known as the “seam zone”.
The course of the vast concrete
and steel barrier puts around 10% of the West Bank and around 50,000
Palestinians on the “Israeli” side.
The International Court of
Justice advised in 2004 that the barrier was illegal where it crossed
into the West Bank and should be removed.
The new checkpoint
policy would also “significantly curtail” the UNRWA staff’s ability to
enter Jerusalem from the West Bank. It is expected to reduce the number
of crossings that staff can use to enter Jerusalem from 13 to three or
four.
“Unless access is assured, there will be a high human
cost,” said AbuZayd. “More lives will be lost, public health will
suffer and the standards of education will fall. The resulting sense of
isolation and abandonment accompanied by an increase in radicalism
serves no one’s interests.”
However, Israel defended the proposed
system, which it said would facilitate crossings to and from the West
Bank while protecting Israel’s security.
Mark Regev, a spokesman
for the Israeli foreign ministry, said: “The idea of building these big
crossings is to streamline the process, to make them user-friendly. The
idea is to help facilitate movement and access.”
He said there
had been complaints of long delays at smaller checkpoints and that the
larger terminals would make crossings easier. “The idea is to upgrade
the system to facilitate greater efficiency,” he said.
He said
Israel was still cautious of security threats. “There is very clear
information that the people who want to torpedo Annapolis and any
renewal of talks want to upgrade their activities and this is a time
when we have to be cautious,” he said.