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Palestinian territories
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The Palestinian territories are composed of two discontiguous regions, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, whose final status has yet to be determined. The territories, which were originally contained within the British Mandate of Palestine, were captured and occupied by Jordan and by Egypt in the late 1940s, and captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. "Palestinian territories" is one of a number of designations for these areas.
Following the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, portions of the territories have been governed in varying degrees by the Palestinian Authority.
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The Palestinian territories are composed of two discontiguous regions, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, whose final status has yet to be determined. The territories, which were originally contained within the British Mandate of Palestine, were captured and occupied by Jordan and by Egypt in the late 1940s, and captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. "Palestinian territories" is one of a number of designations for these areas.
Following the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, portions of the territories have been governed in varying degrees by the Palestinian Authority. Israel does not consider East Jerusalem nor the former Israeli - Jordanian no man's land (the former annexed in 1980 and the latter in 1967) to be parts of the West Bank. Israel claims that both fall under full Israeli law and jurisdiction as opposed to the 58% of the Israeli-defined West Bank which is ruled by the Israeli 'Judea and Samaria Civil Administration', although this has not been recognized by any other country.
Name
There are differences of opinion as to what the Palestinian territories should be called.
The United Nations, the International Court of Justice, International Committee of the Red Cross and the Government of the United Kingdom all refer to the "Occupied Palestinian Territories". Journalists also use the description to indicate lands outside the Green Line. The term is often used interchangeably with the term occupied territories, although this term is also applied to the Golan Heights, which is not claimed by the Palestinians. The confusion stems from the fact that all these territories were captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War and are treated by the United Nations as territory occupied by Israel.
Other terms used to describe these areas collectively include "the disputed territories", "Israeli-occupied territories", and "the occupied territories". Further terms include "Yesha" (Judea-Samaria-Gaza), Yosh (Judea and Samaria), the Katif Strip (Gaza Strip), "liberated territories", "administered territories", "territories of undetermined permanent status", "1967 territories", and simply "the territories".
Many Arab and Islamic leaders, including some Palestinians, use the designation "Palestine" and "occupied Palestine", to imply a Palestinian political or religious claim to Sovereignty over the whole of the former territory of the British Mandate west of the Jordan, including all of Israel. Many of them view the land of Palestine as an Islamic Waqf (trust) for future Muslim generations. A parallel exists in the aspirations of some Zionists and Jewish religious leaders to establish Jewish sovereignty over all of Greater Israel in trust for the Jewish people.
Many Israelis object to the term "occupied Palestinian territories", and similar descriptions, because such designations, they maintain, disregard legitimate Israeli claims to parts of the West Bank and Gaza, or prejudice negotiations involving possible border changes, arguing that the armistice line which was agreed to following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War was not intended to be a permanent border. Israeli right-wing politician Shmuel Katz, in a preliminary brief, whose arguments were analysed and dismissed later by the International Court of Justice to which it was directed, rejects the rulings of that Court and, with it, resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, asserting that the standard term in international law, "occupied Palestinian lands" is "the common language of Arab anti-Israel propaganda, a part of the Arabs' fictional history, which it has succeeded in disseminating throughout the whole wide world". Katz further claimed that "Impartial groups should not be blind to the fact that there are two sides to the dispute in Palestine, and that Israel rejects absolutely the notion that it is illegally holding 'Palestinian lands'." Similarly, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has written: "It would be far more accurate to describe the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "disputed territories" to which both Israelis and Palestinians have claims."
Political status
The political status of these territories has been the subject of negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and of numerous statements and resolutions by the United Nations. (See List of United Nations resolutions concerning Israel.) Since 1994, the autonomous Palestinian National Authority has exercised various degrees of control in large parts of the territories, as a result of the Declaration of Principles contained in the Oslo Accords.
After Hamas won a majority of seats in elections for the Palestinian Parliament, the United States and Israel instituted an economic blockade of the Gaza Strip. When that failed to topple the new government, a covert operation was launched to eliminate Hamas by force. The covert initiative was exposed when confidential State Department documents were accidentally leaked by the US envoy. The talking points delivered to the Fatah leadership said:
Since the Battle of Gaza (2007), the administration of the territories has been contested by two rival entities, with Hamas controlling the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian National Authority (with Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah in leadership) continuing to administer the West Bank. Both groups claim legitimacy over leadership of the Palestinian territories and neither recognizes the legitimacy of the other. Most countries with an interest in the issues, including most of the Arab countries, recognise the administration of Mahmoud Abbas as the legitimate government over both Palestinian territories.
The current and future political status of the territories is highly controversial. Specific issues include the legality of Israeli policies allegedly encouraging settlement, whether it is legitimate for Israel to annex portions of the territories, whether Israel is legally an occupying power according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, and whether an independent Arab state will be created in the territories.
Boundaries
The Palestinian territories consist of two (or perhaps three) distinct areas — the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Israel regards East Jerusalem not to be a part of the West Bank, but regards it is as part of a unified Jerusalem, which is Israel's capital. The eastern limit of the West Bank is the border with Jordan. The Israel-Jordan peace treaty defined that border as the international border, and Jordan renounced all claims to territory west of it. The border segment between Jordan and the West Bank was left undefined pending a definitive agreement on the status of the territory .
The southern limit of the Gaza Strip is the border with Egypt. Egypt renounced all claims to land north of the international border, including the Gaza Strip, in the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. The Palestinians were not parties to either agreement.
In any event, the natural geographic boundaries for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, respectively.
It is now generally accepted, at least as a basis for negotiation between the sides, that the boundaries between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the State of Israel are what has historically been referred to as the Green Line. The Green Line represents the armistice lines under the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which brought an end to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and which were expressly declared in the Agreements to be armistice lines and not international borders.
Between the Armistice of 1949 and the Six-Day War of 1967, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were occupied and annexed by Jordan and the Gaza Strip was occupied (but not annexed) by Egypt. The term "Palestinian" began to be applied exclusively to the Arab population of these areas only after Israel's victory in the 1967 War, and consequently the terms "Palestinian territories" and "occupied Palestinian territories" also gained wide usage. The Palestinians had until the start of serious negotiations for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian issues (the Peace Process) refrained from defining the boundaries of what they called "the occupied territories", and which some even called "occupied Palestine", which implied a potential Palestinian claim to the whole of Israel. It was in the context of the negotiations that the term "1967 borders" came to be used, as a basis for negotiation. "The 1967 borders" are in fact the 1949 armistice lines (which is the Green Line), which all Arab countries and Palestinians at the time insisted were to be temporary and with no other legal status. The Palestinian negotiators claim a return to those lines as the boundary for a future Palestinian state. The Palestinians also claim that East Jerusalem is a part of the occupied West Bank within the boundaries of the "1967 borders".
History
In 1922 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire that ruled Palestine for four centuries (1517–1917), the British Mandate for Palestine was established. Large-scale Jewish immigration from abroad, mainly from Eastern Europe took place during the British Mandate, though Jewish immigration started during the Ottoman period. The future of Palestine was hotly disputed between Arabs and Jews. In 1947, the total Jewish ownership of land in Palestine was 1,850,000 dunams or 1,850 square kilometers, which is 7.04% of the total land of Palestine. Public property or "crown lands", the bulk of which was in the Negev, belonging to the government of Palestine may have made up as much as 70% of the total land; with the Arabs, Christians and others owning the rest.
The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan proposed a division of the mandated territory between an Arab and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem and the surrounding area to be a corpus separatum under a special international regime. The regions allotted to the proposed Arab state included what would become the Gaza Strip and almost all of what would become the West Bank, as well as other areas.
The Partition Plan was passed by the UN General Assembly on November 1947. Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, one day before the expiration of the British Mandate for Palestine. US President Harry Truman recognized the State of Israel de facto the following day. (The United States recognized it de jure on January 31, 1949.) The Arab countries responded by declaring war on the newly formed State of Israel, first in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which ended in Israel's victory.
After the war, Israel controlled many of the areas designated for the Arab state, and the negotiated agreements established Armistice Demarcation Lines (ADLs), which did not have the status of recognised international borders.
Thus the areas held by Jordanian and Iraqi forces (with minor adjustments) came under Jordanian control, and became known as the West Bank (of the Jordan River, by contrast with the East Bank, or Jordan proper); the area held by Egyptian forces, along the Mediterranean coast in the vicinity of the city of Gaza and south to the international border, remained under Egyptian control and became known as the Gaza Strip.
For nineteen years following the 1949 Armistice Agreements until the 1967 Six Day War, Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip and Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and no Arab state was created. In 1950, Jordan annexed the territories it occupied; this annexation was officially recognized only by the United Kingdom.
Article 24 of the Palestinian National Charter of 1964 stated: "This Organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area."
Israel captured both territories in the 1967 Six-Day War; since then they have been under Israeli control. Immediately after the war, on June 19, 1967, the Israeli government offered to return the Golan Heights to Syria, the Sinai to Egypt and most of the West Bank to Jordan in exchange for peace. At the Khartoum Summit in September, the Arab parties responded to this overture by declaring "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel."
UN Security Council Resolution 242 introduced the "Land for Peace" formula for normalizing relations between Israel and its neighbors. This formula was used when Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1979 in exchange for a peace treaty. While that treaty mentioned a "linkage" between Israeli-Egyptian peace and Palestinian autonomy, the formerly Egyptian-occupied territory in Gaza was excluded from the agreement, and remained under Israeli control.
The Oslo Accords of the early 1990s between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority. This was an interim organization created to administer a limited form of Palestinian self-governance in the territories for a period of five years during which final-status negotiations would take place. The Palestinian Authority carried civil responsibility in some rural areas, as well as security responsibility in the major cities of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Although the five-year interim period expired in 1999, the final status agreement has yet to be concluded despite attempts such as the 2000 Camp David Summit, the Taba summit, and the unofficial Geneva Accords.
In 2005, Israeli forces withdrew from the Gaza Strip, ceding full effective internal control of the territory to the Palestinian Authority.
Since the Battle of Gaza (2007) the two separate territories, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, are divided into a Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip and a Fatah civil leadership in the autonomous areas of the West Bank. Each sees itself as the administrator of all Palestinian territories and does not acknowledge the other one as the official government of the territories. The Palestinian territories have therefore de facto split into two entities.
Legal status
The final status of the "Palestinian territories" as becoming (wholly or largely) an independent state for "Arabs" is supported by the countries that back the Quartet's "Road map for peace". The government of Israel also accepted the road map but with 14 reservations.
The Palestinian position is that the creation and the presence of Israeli settlements in those areas is a violation of international law. This has also been affirmed by a majority of members of the Geneva convention: "12. The participating High Contracting Parties call upon the Occupying Power to fully and effectively respect the Fourth Geneva Convention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and to refrain from perpetrating any violation of the Convention. They reaffirm the illegality of the settlements in the said territories and of the extension thereof. They recall the need to safeguard and guarantee the rights and access of all inhabitants to the Holy Places."
Israel contends that the settlements are not illegal and the occupation is not illegal, and views the territory as being the subject of legitimate diplomatic dispute and negotiation under international law.
East Jerusalem, captured in 1967, was unilaterally annexed by Israel. The UN Security Council Resolution 478 condemned the Jerusalem Law as "a violation of international law". This annexation has not been recognized by other nations, although the United States Congress declared its intention to recognize the annexation (a proposal that has been condemned by other states and organizations). Because of the question of Jerusalem's status, no states base their diplomatic missions there and treat Tel Aviv as the capital. Israel asserts that these territories are not currently claimed by any other state, and that Israel has the right to control them.
Israel's position has not been officially accepted by most countries and international bodies. The West Bank, and the Gaza Strip have been referred to as occupied territories (with Israel as the occupying power) by Palestinian Arabs, the rest of the Arab bloc, the UK , the EU, (usually) the USA (, ), both the General Assembly and the Security Council of the United Nations , the International Court of Justice, and the Israeli Supreme Court (see Israeli West Bank barrier).
Some countries and international figures have accorded some credibility to Israel's position. U.S. President George W. Bush has stated that he does not expect Israel to return entirely to pre-1967 borders, due to "new realities on the ground."
Both U.S. President Bill Clinton and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who played notable roles in attempts at mediation, noted the need for some territorial and diplomatic compromise on this issue, based on the validity of some of the claims of both sides. One compromise offered by Clinton would have allowed Israel to keep some settlements in the West Bank, especially those which were in large blocs near the pre-1967 borders of Israel. In return, Palestinians would have received some concessions of land in other parts of the country.
The United Nations did not declare any change in the status of the territories as of the creation of the Palestinian National Authority between 1993 and 2000. Although a 1999 U.N. document implied that the chance for a change in that status was slim at that period, most observers agreed that the Palestinian territories' classification as occupied was losing substantiality, and would be withdrawn after the signing of a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians (see also Proposals for a Palestinian state).
During the period between the 1993 Oslo Accords and the Second Intifada beginning in 2000, Israeli officials claimed that the term "occupation" did not accurately reflect the state of affairs in the territories. During this time, the Palestinian population in large parts of the territories had a large degree of autonomy and only limited exposure to the IDF except when seeking to move between different areas. Following the events of the Second Intifada, and in particular, Operation Defensive Shield, most territories, including Palestinian cities (Area A), are back under effective Israeli military control, so the discussion along those lines is largely moot.
In the summer of 2005, Israel implemented its unilateral disengagement plan; about 8500 Israeli citizens living in the Gaza Strip were forcibly removed from the territory; some received alternative homes and a sum of money. The Israel Defense Forces vacated Gaza in 2005, but invaded it again in 2006 in response to rocket attacks and the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by Hamas.
The Palestinian territories have been assigned a country code of PS in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, and accordingly, the Palestinian Authority was granted control of the corresponding Internet country code top-level domain .ps.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (S/RES/242), one of the most commonly referenced UN resolutions in Middle Eastern politics, was adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967 in the aftermath of the Six Day War. It was adopted under Chapter VI
of the United Nations Charter, and was reaffirmed by UN Security Council Resolution 338, adopted after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The resolution calls for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" (there has been some disagreement about whether this means all the territories: see UN Security Council Resolution 242: semantic dispute) and the "[t]ermination of all claims or states of belligerency". It also calls for the mutual recognition by the belligerent parties (Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan) of each other's established states and calls for the establishment of secure and recognized boundaries for all parties.
See also
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