WEST BANK: Palestinian villagers support proposed opening of UN registry to record claims of damages caused by the building of the Israeli barrier in the West Bank

Palestinian villagers in the West Bank have said they are cautiously optimistic regarding plans by the U.N. General Assembly to hold a delayed special session on Friday (December 15) to approve plans for a registry to record claims of damages caused by Israel's construction of its West Bank barrier. The session was delayed by 10 days to enable the assembly president to complete a trip to the Middle East. The request for the special session came from Arab states after U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan reported he was ready to set up the registry and invited the 192-nation assembly to approve his proposals. The assembly first called for the registry in an August 2004 resolution asking Israel to heed a World Court ruling and tear down the barrier. A mix of electronic fences and walls, the barrier has been under construction since 2002 and eventually will stretch 400 miles (670 km). Israel says it is building the barrier to keep out suicide bombers but Palestinians see the action as a land grab aimed at dashing their hopes for eventual statehood. The court said in a July 9, 2004, advisory opinion that the barrier was illegal because it cut into West Bank land to shield Israeli settlements built on territory seized by the Jewish state in the 1967 Middle East War. It said Israel was obliged to return to their rightful owners any land, orchards, olive groves or other immovable property seized as part of the barrier's construction. Should restitution prove impossible, the Jewish state should compensate those suffering losses or material damage due to its placement or construction, the court said. Muhammad Abu Rahma is a member of the local council of the West Bank village of Beilin, one of the Palestinian villages which has suffered heavy losses through Israeli confiscation of land to make way for the the construction of the barrier. "The wall (Israeli barrier) cut off from our land -- behind our village to the West -- it cut off 2,000 dunams (2,000,000 square metres), 2,024 dunams (2,024,000 square metres). Most of this land is covered with olive trees and soft fruit trees. If they (Israeli authorities) were to allow us to enter this land you would be able to see the almond and fig trees growing there. Over 10,000 olive trees -- large "Romani" trees (trees planted during Roman times) -- were planted there (area of village land cleared of trees to make way for building the Israeli barrier), and they had been there since the time of our fathers and grandfathers and our grandfathers' ancestors," said Abu Rahma, who is also a member of the local Popular Committee Against The Wall. The special session had been tentatively set for December 5 when president Haya Rashed Al Khalifa of Bahrain asked for a delay until Dec. 15 so she could travel to Dubai for a week to attend a conference on women and education in the Arab world, the diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Aides to Haya said the trip was just one reason for the delay but declined to give others. A draft resolution to be put to a vote at Friday's assembly session calls for the establishment within six months of a three-member board and a secretariat to record and process damage claims, as Annan recommended. Some villagers who have lost land to the barrier do not expect the session to come to any results in their favour. "We are now used to the United Nations and the Security Council and all international bodies, and to how they only work for the benefit of the (Israeli) occupation and not the (Palestinian) resident. They have never thought of Othman or of anyone else as a person who has the right to live. This has never happened, not in the United Nations nor in any of the international human rights groups that are around," said Beilin farmer Othman Mansour, 114,000 square metres of whose land were confiscated by Israel to make way for the barrier. But Abu Rahma says he dares to hope some good will come of the session. "We will be the first people to file this request. And we ask of you to tell us what the procedures are that we must follow to file this request and this complaint, and we are ready to file it. It is possible for us to feel a little bit of optimism that they will take into consideration the plight of Beilin and other villages which have been harmed by the building of this racist wall," Abu Rahma said. The draft was put forward by a group of mostly Arab states that also includes some Muslim nations and Zimbabwe. Payment of the claims would be up to Israel, which initially vowed to ignore the World Court ruling but later changed the barrier's route so that it cut less deeply into the West Bank. The registry would remain open as long as the barrier exists, according to the draft. The United Nations initially said it would set up the registry in the West Bank so its offices would be close to those filing damage claims. But in an October 17 report to the assembly, Annan said he would put the offices in Vienna.

ITN Source | December 15, 2006

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