Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
From Al Monitor:
To pressure Palestinians and force them to back down from their decision to stop security coordination, Israel is refusing to recognize more than 24,000 Palestinian newborns while preventing their movement through crossings as well as their travel abroad.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — After waiting for six months, Anwar Abdel Hakim, a Palestinian from the town of Mikhmas in the center of the West Bank, managed to obtain the identification papers and US-Palestinian passport for her son Mohammed to join her husband in the United States. They were supposed to travel Aug. 9.
However, Hakim did not know that upon arrival at the Karama border crossing to Jordan, the Israelis would ban her newborn Mohammed from traveling. His ID number was not in the Israeli records because it was not transferred from the Palestinian Authority (PA).
This is the case for thousands of Palestinian newborns who were born after the PA announced in May it would halt security coordination with Israel because of the Israeli annexation plan.
In normal times, the PA would regularly transfer the records of newborns and the names of those who renewed their passports to the Israeli authorities, which control the border crossings and security permits in Israel.
..
Like Mohammed, there are thousands of babies that to this day have not been recognized by Israel after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced in May that he wants to halt security coordination with Israel. This prevented hundreds of these babies from traveling with their families to their areas of residence despite full coordination with the Jordanian authorities.
According to figures Al-Monitor obtained from the General Authority for Civil Affairs, 24,279 Palestinian babies — 13,567 in the West Bank and 10,712 in the Gaza Strip — were born between May 20 and Aug. 9 and remain unrecognized by Israel.
The Palestinian Ministry of Interior says it is doing all the required work related to registering newborns in its records and issuing the official papers, but such records are no longer transferred to the Israeli side as was the case before the security coordination was halted.
Israel, like every country, has policies on who can enter or exit. it didn’t change those policies. The PA decided to stop giving Israel the information necessary to verify the identity of the travelers.
And they blame Israel.
Undersecretary of the Interior Ministry Youssef Harb told Al-Monitor that these unilateral measures are taken by Israel to manipulate the fate of these children in order to pressure the Palestinian political leadership into backtracking on its decision to stop the security coordination.
The only party that did anything unilaterally was the Palestinian Authority.
…Ahmed al-Deek, political adviser to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, who is following up on this issue, told Al-Monitor that the Israeli position is a racist measure that violates human rights principles and the duties of the occupying state to facilitate the movement of the population.
Somehow, Israel doing exactly what it has been doing for decades is now racist.
It just goes to show that Palestinians never take any responsibility for their actions, and blame Israel for everything.
It is also absurd that the PA refusing to cooperate with Israel even for lifesaving transfers of patients to hospitals is called “security coordination.” It is a euphemism meant to hide the fact that the PA has decided to hurt its own people just so articles like this can be written and some Westerners will think that Israel is awful.
