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Israel turns off power to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the dead of winter

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are cashed strapped this winter because Israel is withholding $240 million in tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority as punishment for joining the ICC. This is radical, though it’s not unusual and something we’ve come to expect. But turning off the electricity in the middle of winter as blizzards sweep across the Middle East is nothing short of sadistic. The Los Angeles Times reports Israel cut the power to more than 700,000 Palestinians in two of Palestine’s largest urban areas, Nablus and Jenin, for more than 45 minutes “and warned that more outages are coming if Palestinian officials don’t pay millions of dollars in outstanding debt.”

Citing Yiftah Ron-Tal, the director of Israel Electric Corp. (IEC), the Times reports:

“Customers who do not pay electric bills are disconnected; yet here we have an entire population that doesn’t pay while we continue to supply electricity,” he said. “The Palestinian Authority owes the IEC — meaning the paying consumers — nearly 2 billion Israeli shekels [about $500 million]. A year has passed since I said this last and nothing has changed. Starting today, we will begin restricting electricity.”

The irony here, of withholding the months of  tax revenue while demanding payment of a debt, on top of occupation policy preventing Palestinians from being self sufficient, is not lost on anyone. More from the Times:

“This is clearly collective punishment against the Palestinian people,” [Ghassan Shakaa, the mayor of Nablus and chairman of the board of the North Electricity Company, which supplies Nablus, Jenin] said. According to Shakaa, the IEC cut power shortly after notifying his company that it owed more than $10 million, and did not wait for an answer or for payment……

Rashid Fadda, who lives in Nablus and works as a technician for the local electric company, said the power cuts came as a surprise.

“We heard the Israeli company threatening to cut power supply to the West Bank but no one really thought it will happen,” he said. “My work depends on electricity and so when the power was cut off, we had to stop work.”

In more winter news, IMEMC reports settlers from the Gilo settlement have “opened its barrages, throwing all excess rain and melted snow water” flooding Aida Refugee camp near Bethlehem.

Hundreds of Palestinians flee as Israel opens dams into Gaza Valley Feb. 22, 2015 (Photo: Ma'an News)
Hundreds of Palestinians flee as Israel opens dams into Gaza Valley Feb. 22, 2015 (Photo: Ma’an News)

Plus, Israel opened dams near the border of Gaza on Sunday morning, flooding the valley causing hundreds of Palestinians to evacuate their homes. That happened last year too.  Are these kinds of punitive measures something Palestinians have come to expect from Israel every winter like clockwork?

Remember last year when Israel caged Palestinian children in outdoor holding pens during freezing winter storms?

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Does ‘adding insult to injury’ begin to describe the vulgar infamy …… ?

Thanks for this really important and well- done article, Annie. The cruelty toward, and disregard for the lives of Occupied Palestinians continues unabated.

Reposting here:

Amira Hass:

“Will the PA be forced to dissolve? The dangers of Palestinian recession

The PA cannot guarantee its residents a fair economic subsistence, even under the occupation, due to Israel’s prohibitive policies, which in eight years have cost the authority tens of billions of shekels.

Between the U.S. court decision against the PLO and the cut off of electrical power to the northern West Bank – the warped logic of the continuing existence of the Palestinian Authority, an entity that should have been temporary but became permanent, reached new heights on Monday.

From the day of its founding two decades ago, the PA had responsibilities and duties, but was deprived of authority and resources. The Oslo Accords between an organization (the PLO) and a state (Israel) created this asymmetric reality: In it, the occupied bears legal and financial responsibility toward the occupier and its citizens, and it is punished if it rises up against the foreign ruler. The occupier is free to keep ruling and to harm the occupied.

Monday was a day of bad economic news for Palestinian society. In the background lies an acute recession, added to five years of chronic economic stagnation. Israel continues to freeze the transfer of Palestinian taxes that it collects, so since January 170,000 public service workers have received only 60 percent of their salaries, which are insufficient to begin with.

The results include a slowdown in commerce in the West Bank, belated payments to institutions and private businesses, and reduction of municipal projects, and therefore a further loss of revenue for the PA, workers who can’t even afford to commute to work, and mounting incidences of burglary.

Compounding the economic recession and stagnation are the hundreds of millions of dollars that jurors in an American court this week ordered the PLO and PA to pay compensation to Israeli-American victims of Palestinian armed attacks; the danger that the Israel Electric Corporation will continue to cut off electricity intermittently; and the flooding in Palestinian neighborhoods in Hebron and the Gaza Strip due to recent storms. All this comes on top of the emotional and physical destruction in Gaza, whose reconstruction seems farther away than ever.”

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.644003

From the article:

“This is an entity that has to function without 62 percent of its territory, without control of water resources and the electromagnetic spectrum, without any control at borders and over population registry and citizenship rights, without freedom of movement, and without any control over the fate of existing and potential revenues – from customs duties, exports, mining, fishing, expanding industry or agriculture.

The World Bank has already determined that the Palestinians are losing billions of dollars annually because of Israeli control over Area C (there was a loss of $3.4 billion in 2011 alone), control that prevents growth and development. And that does not even include losses from Israel’s policy to strangulate manufacture and other productive activity in Gaza, by means of forbidding marketing and exports.

If the PA could guarantee its residents a fair economic subsistence, even under Israeli occupation – it would be able to demand that they and the local and municipal councils pay their electricity bills. But the enormous debts to the IEC and the PA’s difficulties in meeting other payments, like to suppliers, hospitals and universities, are the direct and natural result of restrictions on the freedom of movement and development that Israel has forced upon the authority: The two million shekels the PA owes the IEC are dwarfed by the tens of billions that the Palestinian economy has lost just in the past eight years because of Israel’s restrictive and prohibitive policies.

Is the dissolution of the PA a solution? A member of Islamic Jihad told Haaretz last week, “I detest the PA. Its existence is a disaster, but its dismantlement would be a greater disaster.””

Compare and contrast with this from 2 days ago. Haaretz had this picture from Israel:

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.643545.1424561870!/image/947460304.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_640/947460304.jpg

Someday the world will notice and take offense at Israel’s sticking its thumb in the world’s (the human rights world’s) eye in these manners. And then all hell will break loose.

As it is, this is part of Israel’s 66-yerar pattern: to do something fairly dreadful and then look to see if USA or anyone else takes a serious, a real (not just words) action in response. so far there has been no such action. These feeble (mostly EU) recommendations toward recognition of the State of Palestine are little better than mere words. Amend: a little better.

Pay the bill if you want power! It’s that easy, guys.

Kershner at NYT predictably softens her headline: “With Palestinian Debt Rising, Israeli Utility Briefly Reduces Power to West Bank”. Compare to LA Times headline: “Israel cuts off electricity to thousands of West Bank Palestinians”.