Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Israeli disengagement from Gaza" in English language version.
Israel's 2005 "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip was not only conducted unilaterally, but deliberately rejected coordination with the PA or an orderly handover of the territory to it.
Israel claims it no longer occupies the Gaza Strip, maintaining that it is neither a State nor a territory occupied or controlled by Israel, but rather it has 'sui generis' status. Pursuant to the Disengagement Plan, Israel dismantled all military institutions and settlements in Gaza and there is no longer a permanent Israeli military or civilian presence in the territory. However, the Plan also provided that Israel will guard and monitor the external land perimeter of the Gaza Strip, will continue to maintain exclusive authority in Gaza air space, and will continue to exercise security activity in the sea off the coast of the Gaza Strip as well as maintaining an Israeli military presence on the Egyptian-Gaza border, and reserving the right to reenter Gaza at will. Israel continues to control six of Gaza's seven land crossings, its maritime borders and airspace and the movement of goods and persons in and out of the territory. Egypt controls one of Gaza's land crossings. Gaza is also dependent on Israel for water, electricity, telecommunications and other utilities, currency, issuing IDs, and permits to enter and leave the territory. Israel also has sole control of the Palestinian Population Registry through which the Israeli Army regulates who is classified as a Palestinian and who is a Gazan or West Banker. Since 2000 aside from a limited number of exceptions Israel has refused to add people to the Palestinian Population Registry. It is this direct external control over Gaza and indirect control over life within Gaza that has led the United Nations, the UN General Assembly, the UN Fact Finding Mission to Gaza, International human rights organisations, US Government websites, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a significant number of legal commentators, to reject the argument that Gaza is no longer occupied.
Even after the accession to power of Hamas, Israel's claim that it no longer occupies Gaza has not been accepted by UN bodies, most States, nor the majority of academic commentators because of its exclusive control of its border with Gaza and crossing points including the effective control it exerted over the Rafah crossing until at least May 2011, its control of Gaza's maritime zones and airspace which constitute what Aronson terms the 'security envelope' around Gaza, as well as its ability to intervene forcibly at will in Gaza.
While Israel withdrew from the immediate territory, it remained in control of all access to and from Gaza through the border crossings, as well as through the coastline and the airspace. In addition, Gaza was dependent upon Israel for water, electricity sewage communication networks and for its trade (Gisha 2007. Dowty 2008). In other words, while Israel maintained that its occupation of Gaza ended with its unilateral disengagement Palestinians – as well as many human rights organizations and international bodies – argued that Gaza was by all intents and purposes still occupied.
However, according to Article 42 of the Hague Regulations (1907), a belligerent has effective control of a territory so long as it has established its authority and has the ability to exercise it, regardless of the continuous presence of ground troops. The Nuremberg Tribunal and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), are among the tribunals that have affirmed that a territory remains occupied so long as an army could reestablish physical control of that territory "at any time."
In August 2005, for the first time since Israel was established, Jews no longer formed an absolute majority in the territory they controlled. Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics counted 5.26 million Jews living in Israel-Palestine and, combined with figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, there were 5.62 million non-Jews. Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip allowed it to "subtract" the 1.4 million Palestinians who live there and claim therefore that the overall Jewish majority is back up to about 57 percent.
The so-called demographic threat to Israel's ability to remain a Jewish and democratic state has become a major political issue in Israel over the past decade (this threat pertains not only to the Arab minority within Israel but also to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories over whom Israel effectively rules). It was one of the primary justifications used in support of Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, as Prime Minister Sharon presented the Gaza disengagement as a means of preserving a Jewish majority in the state. It was also the major rationale behind the short-lived "convergence plan" proposed in early 2006 by Sharon's successor Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, which would have involved a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from much of the West Bank. Both of these plans were intended, at least in part, to substantially reduce the number of Palestinians living under Israeli control. As such, they reflected the importance that demographic concerns had come to play in Israel. In the words of Shlomo Brom, a former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Affairs and head of Strategic Planning in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF): "The most salient development in Israeli national security thinking in recent years has been the growing role of demography at the expense of geography."
Unlike the cases of Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland, the conflict in Israel/Palestine is unambiguously unresolved. Nor are the borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state agreed, if such a state ever comes into being. Yet those borders have been subject to considerable negotiation, discussion and, in the case of the barrier and Gaza withdrawal, of action. Only when the boundaries are finally drawn will we be able to determine whether a form of soft demography of the political/ethnic variety has been at work. Significant and concrete developments to date – namely the barrier and the Gaza withdrawal – have indeed been heavily influenced by demographic considerations and can therefore be considered as soft demographic engineering of an ethnic and political nature. For the time being, however, this demographic engineering is work in progress.
Far from seeing themselves as having withdrawn from Gaza in the summer of 2005 "under fire," mainstream Israelis viewed their disengagement from the area as consequence of their success in abating the Intifada and, at the same time, their growing recognition of the limits of force. For them, by 2005 Israel was threatened not by violence but rather by demographic trends in the population residing between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River: changes in the relative size of population groups that now appeared to pose an enormous challenge to Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state. Since Jews were about to lose their majority status in the area, it became clear that Israel's continued control of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem posed the following dilemma: either grant the Arab population in these areas full participatory rights, in which case Israel would lose its character as a Jewish state, or continue to deny them such rights, in which case Israel could no longer be considered a democracy.[permanent dead link]
The HCJ determined that Israel has no effective control of the Gaza Strip and, therefore, has no obligation or effective capability for maintaining public order in the Gaza Strip and ensuring the welfare of Gaza's residents. The HCJ did not explain what theory or facts led it to this conclusion, and did not engage any of the existing case law on the issue.
Israel insisted its occupation had ended, but it also recognized that Gaza was not sovereign. It declared Gaza a "hostile entity," which was neither a state wherein Palestinians have the right to police and protect themselves nor an occupied territory whose civilian population Israel had a duty to protect. This meant that it could deny Palestinians the right to fully govern themselves and simultaneously use military force to thwart their resistance to colonial domination.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)Military occupation is considered to exist in a territory, or part of a territory, if the following elements can be demonstrated: the presence of foreign troops, which are in a position to exercise effective control without the consent of the sovereign. According to widespread expert opinion, physical presence of foreign troops is a sine qua non requirement of occupation, that is, occupation is not conceivable without "boots on the ground", therefore forces exercising naval or air control through a naval or air blockade do not suffice.
Israel claims it no longer occupies the Gaza Strip, maintaining that it is neither a State nor a territory occupied or controlled by Israel, but rather it has 'sui generis' status. Pursuant to the Disengagement Plan, Israel dismantled all military institutions and settlements in Gaza and there is no longer a permanent Israeli military or civilian presence in the territory. However, the Plan also provided that Israel will guard and monitor the external land perimeter of the Gaza Strip, will continue to maintain exclusive authority in Gaza air space, and will continue to exercise security activity in the sea off the coast of the Gaza Strip as well as maintaining an Israeli military presence on the Egyptian-Gaza border, and reserving the right to reenter Gaza at will. Israel continues to control six of Gaza's seven land crossings, its maritime borders and airspace and the movement of goods and persons in and out of the territory. Egypt controls one of Gaza's land crossings. Gaza is also dependent on Israel for water, electricity, telecommunications and other utilities, currency, issuing IDs, and permits to enter and leave the territory. Israel also has sole control of the Palestinian Population Registry through which the Israeli Army regulates who is classified as a Palestinian and who is a Gazan or West Banker. Since 2000 aside from a limited number of exceptions Israel has refused to add people to the Palestinian Population Registry. It is this direct external control over Gaza and indirect control over life within Gaza that has led the United Nations, the UN General Assembly, the UN Fact Finding Mission to Gaza, International human rights organisations, US Government websites, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a significant number of legal commentators, to reject the argument that Gaza is no longer occupied.
Even after the accession to power of Hamas, Israel's claim that it no longer occupies Gaza has not been accepted by UN bodies, most States, nor the majority of academic commentators because of its exclusive control of its border with Gaza and crossing points including the effective control it exerted over the Rafah crossing until at least May 2011, its control of Gaza's maritime zones and airspace which constitute what Aronson terms the 'security envelope' around Gaza, as well as its ability to intervene forcibly at will in Gaza.
While Israel withdrew from the immediate territory, it remained in control of all access to and from Gaza through the border crossings, as well as through the coastline and the airspace. In addition, Gaza was dependent upon Israel for water, electricity sewage communication networks and for its trade (Gisha 2007. Dowty 2008). In other words, while Israel maintained that its occupation of Gaza ended with its unilateral disengagement Palestinians – as well as many human rights organizations and international bodies – argued that Gaza was by all intents and purposes still occupied.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)[A]s far as wartime actions against enemy nationals are concerned, the Genocide Convention added virtually nothing to what was already covered (and had been since the Hague Convention of 1899) by the internationally accepted laws of land warfare, which require an occupying power to respect family honors and rights, individual lives and private property, as well as religious convictions and liberty of the enemy nationals. But the laws of war do not cover, in time of either war or peace, a government's actions against its own nationals (such as Nazi Germany's persecution of German Jews).
Ms. Beziz explains the purpose of the Katif Center. "Our goal is to tell the story of 35 years of pioneering the land of Israel in Gush Katif and to allow an insight as to what life was in Gush Katif."
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)