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West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Palestinian Authority Territories








Introduction





Asia

Europe and Central Asia

Middle East and North Africa

Special Issues and Campaigns

United States

Arms

Children’s Rights

Women’s Human Rights

Appendix




Defending Human Rights

Israel and the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip

Israel permitted human rights organizations to collect and disseminate information in areas under its control. However, according to PCATI, lawyers for Palestinian detainees frequently had difficulty gaining access to their clients, and even after filing legal challenges against such denials sometimes waited weeks or months before being able to meet their clients. Closures often kept Palestinian human rights workers and lawyers, including those with Israeli citizenship or Jerusalem identity cards, from traveling freely within the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. Palestinians who had previously been detained were also refused access to prisons and detainees.

Palestinian Authority

Palestinian NGOs and activists continued to be subjected to police harassment and threats by P.A. officials because of their criticism of P.A. abuses. These actions may have contributed to violent attacks on activists, including the December 1, 1999, shooting of Palestinian Legislative Council member Mu`awwiya al-Masri by masked men; the December 11, 1999, stoning by unknown persons of Hanan Elmasu, director of Birzeit University's Human Rights Action Project, which knocked her unconscious; and the December 16, 1999, beating of Palestinian Legislative Council member `Abd al-Jawad Saleh by General Intelligence officers. All three attacks were apparently in retaliation for support of a November 1999 petition campaign. In February staff members of the PHRMG received threatening letters and phone calls warning them to resign and threatening to include their names in a public campaign against the organization.

On April 19 the Ministry of Interior improperly closed the Gaza-based Civic Forum Institute, established in 1998, on the grounds that it was not a registered organization under NGO Law 1/2000. The law set a nine-month deadline for NGOs to comply with the regulations or be considered illegal. Government officials also continued to attack Palestinian human rights organizations and activists in the press. In February, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) filed a complaint with the attorney general against Khalil al-Zaben, coordinator of the government-appointed NGO council, for defamatory statements in the semi-official al-Nashra magazine. As of this writing no action had been taken on that case or previous defamation cases against al-Zaben.

Police detained Khalil Abu Shamala, director of Addameer, a Gaza-based human rights organization specializing in prisoners' rights, on April 16, immediately after he had issued a press release protesting Chief of Police Ghazi al-Jabali's ban on Addameer's rally scheduled for that afternoon to commemorate Palestinian Prisoners' Day. He was released on April 17. On August 8, al-Jabali ordered LAW and its director, Khader Shkirat, banned from "visiting prisons, detention centers, police command centers, and police locations" because of his "continuous attacks on the [Palestinian] Authority." The order followed an incident the previous day, when Shkirat was violently removed from the Ramallah police headquarters after he raised cases of police torture of detainees and protested against official interference in LAW's lawyers' access to certain detainees.

Human Rights Watch World Report 2000

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