Ref: 43/2007

Date: 02 September  2007

PCHR’s Director, Raji Sourani, was unable to travel outside the Gaza Strip to attend the “UN Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace” held in Belgium. Sourani was slated to chair one of the conference sessions and present a paper. The conference was organized by UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and was held in the European Parliament Building in Brussels on August 30-31 2007.

In a letter addressed to the conference’s 650 participants and organizers, Sourani said, “I am one of nearly 1.6 million human beings residing in the Gaza Strip. We are caged in a large, open-air prison. The border crossings are at the mercy of an occupying power; and these terminals, the Strip’s veins of life, are hermetically sealed. Over the past year and half, our movement in and out of the Strip has been impossible. Irrelevant of illness, education, employment, or any other humanitarian necessity, the prison gates are closed. My wife and 2 kids have been in Egypt for 1.5 years… The situation is beyond economic and political siege; it is social and humanitarian strangulation, where people cannot move to attend to their basic needs. As a result, Gaza lives in an unprecedented catastrophic situation. The international community and Israel are parties to the crime. At the same time, the occupation and war crimes continue unabated in the West Bank.”

In addition, Sourani sent his paper entitled, Enforcement of International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: The Only Real Roadmap for Peace” for presentation at the conference. It described the human rights situation in Palestine, including Israeli violations perpetrated since the outbreak of Al-Aqsa Intifada and the violations stemming from the unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip plan. Outlining the failures of the peace process vis-à-vis respect for human rights, Sourani called for enforcing international law in the OPT to all outstanding issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the issues of statehood, borders, & refugees.

** Click here for a pdf copy of the paper