New and deeper Israeli military-imposed sanctions are to start to affect Gaza now – apparently, according to the Israeli media, starting from Thursday.
Israel’s High Court of Justice (Supreme Court) has upheld the Israeli military’s decision to tighten fuel cuts from 7 February — and to inaugurate graduated electricity cuts — against the Gaza strip.
Some kinds of food will also be restricted, according to press reports, but the details are not clear.
The electricity that Israel‘s Electric Company sells to Gaza will be reduced by 5% on each of three direct-feed lines, one by one, that have been specially fitted with a sort of dimmer that allows controlled reductions in supply coming from Israel.
According to the Israeli human rights organization Gisha, one of the organizations trying to block the cuts since 28 October through a petition and appeals to the Israeli Supreme Court, “the power supplied by the first line will be cut by 5%. The electricity supplied by the two other lines will be reduced by 5% each over the next two weeks. In total, Gaza will suffer a 1.5 megawatt reduction in electricity sold via the Israeli electric grid”.
The petitioners argued that the fuel and electricity cuts were illegal collective punishment, because they target and indiscriminately punish Gaza’s civilian population for acts committed by fighters, while international law prohibits punishing individuals for acts that they did not personally commit, and forbids targeting civilians.
After the Supreme Court rejected the petition to block the fuel and electricity cuts, Gisha and Adalah said in a joint statement that: “This decision sets a dangerous legal precedent that allows Israel to continue to violate the rights of Palestinians in Gaza and deprive them of basic humanitarian needs, in violation of international law.”
In a plan presented a few months ago, the military suggested it would continue reducing the electricity on these lines at periodic intervals, until there is a stop to attacks by Qassam rockets and other projectiles from Gaza on Israeli territory. The basis for the military actions is a 19 September declaration by the Israeli cabinet that Gaza is a “hostile territory” or “enemy entity”:
The Palestinian Authority has a contract to buy 120 MW of electricity daily from the Israel Electric Company, but in recent months the supply has often been somewhat less. This electricity is paid by the PA – and the Israeli Ministry of Finance takes the money directly from Israeli-controlled accounts holding customs and tax monies collected by Israel on behalf of the PA.
The military had originally proposed cutting supply on four out of the ten Israel Electric Company lines that cross between Israel and Gaza.
In statements to the Court, the military has admitted factual errors, mistakes and “local error” which resulted in cuts of directly-supplied Israeli electricity despite the Courts previous request to hold off until it reached a decision. There have also been recent “technical problems” on some of the lines.
The military also told the Court on 27 January that it believes 2.2 million liters of industrial diesel fuel per week is enough for Gaza’s power plant.
However, with that amount, the power plant can only operate two turbines at partial loads, generating only between 45-55 MW of electricity per day. And, without replenishment of the plants reserves, a shortfall on any one day could mean that the power plant would again have to shut down, as it did on 20 January for two days.
Meanwhile, because of the electricity shortfall, and the lack of ordinary diesel fuel to operate back-up and stand-by generators, 40 million liters of sewage a day have been emptied directly into the Mediterranean Sea, to avoid catastrophic flooding that could endanger human lives in Gaza.
Sari Bashi of GISHA said that the court had been informed that Gaza currently has an electricity deficit of 24%, and rolling blackouts across the Strip are as long as 12 hours per day in some areas. The electricity shortage has increased the dependence on diesel-powered generators – but Israel has also cut the amount of diesel delivered to Gaza. The clean water supply has fallen by 30% to some areas in Gaza, and hospitals have reduced services and denied care to non-urgent cases.
Gisha said yesterday (Wednesday 6 February) that “Israel has already cut Gaza‘ s electricity supply by 25 megawatts – by preventing Gaza‘s power plant from purchasing sufficient quantities of industrial diesel to operate at capacity”.
That fuel is ordered by the Palestinian Authority, and delivered by the private Israeli company Dor Alon, but paid for by the European Union. Before the military-ordered cuts at the end of October, the EU was paying some $10 million dollars a month to keep Gaza’s Power Plant operating at partial capacity.
Gisha says that the state attorney, representing the military, “argued that the fuel cuts are economic sanctions taken against Gaza as part of ‘economic warfare’, which was described as a life-saving alternative to a large-scale ground operation. They argued that Gaza is no longer occupied, but that even if it were, only minimal obligations are owed to its civilian population, obligations which they characterized as the duty to avoid a humanitarian crisis or to permit the fulfillment of minimal humanitarian needs. They argued that they were permitting enough fuel and electricity to provide for humanitarian needs, and that it was up to the leadership in Gaza to prioritize its distribution to give preference to humanitarian needs. They argued that they were monitoring the humanitarian situation in Gaza to make sure that basic needs were being met, and that the Defense Minister had broad discretion to wage a battle against militants in the way he saw fit”.
IDF Colonel Nir Press, the head at Erez crossing of the Office of (Israeli) Coordination of Government Affairs, testified to the Court that Qassams, being fired day after day from Gaza at the Israeli city of Sderot, and missiles fired recently at Ashkelon, justified the military policy. Colonel Press told the court that “the Palestinian media and Hamas leadership were distorting the facts in order to create an impression of crisis”.
Gisha believes that the Israeli Supreme Court ducked the points of law at issue when it rejected the petition.
Gisha also expressed “extremely serious concerns … about the court’s factual and legal inquiry and conclusions”.
In an interview with the Jerusalem Post published on 6 February, Gisha’s Sari Bashi said “We are not talking about closing a border to prevent militants from entering Israel…We are talking about applying pressure on a civilian population… because the army doesn’t have a better response”.
Bashi told the Jerusalem Post that “the decision authorizes Israel to punish civilians for the acts of militants – in violation of international law. The decision fails to address the central argument at issue – whether the fuel and electricity cuts constitute collective punishment, as the petitioners claimed, or economic sanctions, as the state claimed – but rather adopts, without explanation, the state’s claim that it may cut fuel and electricity supplies, so long as it does not push Gaza residents below an undefined “humanitarian minimum,” a minimum not recognized in international law. The court was unable to articulate a legally coherent justification for what the state is doing to civilians in Gaza, yet was unwilling to intervene in the state’s actions, so it remained silent on the law, restricting itself to asking whether the fuel and electricity cuts have pushed Gaza residents below an undefined humanitarian “minimum,” and then ignoring well-documented evidence of severe harm to humanitarian needs…Economic sanctions against a party you don’t control could be legal, but Israel controls Gaza’s borders. In any case, sanctions don’t allow you to prevent the passage of humanitarian goods”.
Bashi said to this journalist after the 27 January Supreme Court hearing that “We let the judges know that the state violated the request” for the appearance at the hearing of two Gaza professionals who are co-petitioners in the case, and who could have explained the technical details concerning the Gaza power plant and Gaza’s electricity-distributing company.
Dr. Rafiq Maliha, project manager of the Gaza Power Plant, and Engineer Nedal Toman, project manager of GEDCO, were informed that they would be given permits to participate in the Supreme Court hearing on Sunday 27 January. They arrived at the Erez terminal at 7 am. But, they said, they were not actually given the permits until the court session started at 10 am.
Despite their best efforts, and a frantic taxi ride from the Gaza border to the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, the two Gazans arrived about 20 minutes after the hearing was concluded by the judges, who decided not to wait for their arrival.
Toman has explained in several sworn affidavits presented to the Court that it is impossible to redirect electricity in Gaza. But, in Sunday’s hearing, the state attorney told the Court – without the benefit of Toman’s presence for any questioning on this precise point – that some unnamed “Palestinians” had told the military that it could in fact be done, and humanitarian damage avoided.
So, the Court has decided to be convinced by the state and military assurances that it is not the intention to cause humanitarian damage in Gaza. If there is damage anyway, it would be accidental and unintended – and therefore, apparently, would not be illegal.
The judge’s ruling noted the assurances given by Colonel Peres that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was being monitored – apparently through the military’s “regular contact with Palestinian officials and international organizations who maintain humanitarian needs in Gaza”. And, the judges suggested, any future concerns should be addressed directly “to the military officials in charge of monitoring the humanitarian situation in Gaza”.
The judges also accepted the argument, expressed by Israeli Prime Minister Olmert and other officials, that Israel is in a state of war with Gaza – a territory which, at the very least that can be said, has uncertain legal status.
Indeed, while maintaining that its 2005 unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza means that Israel has no further responsibility there, Israel continues to apply provisions of the Oslo Accords – including the 1994 Paris Protocol – and uses this as the basis for its decision to institute the fuel and electricity cuts, as well as severe import and export restrictions.
But, in an excerpt from the Supreme Court ruling translated from Hebrew by Gisha, the judges wrote: “we note that since September 2005 Israel no longer has effective control over what takes place within the territory of the Gaza Strip. The military government that previously existed in that territory was abolished by decision of the government, and Israeli soldiers are not present in that area on an ongoing basis and do not direct what goes on there. Under these circumstances, the State of Israel bears no general obligation to concern itself with the welfare of the residents of the Strip or to maintain public order within the Gaza Strip, according to the international law of occupation. Israel also has no effective ability, in its current status, to instill order and manage civilian life in Gaza. Under the current circumstances, the primary obligations borne by the State of Israel with regards to the residents of the Gaza Strip are derived from the state of armed conflict that prevails between it and the Hamas organization which controls the Gaza Strip; its obligations also stem from the degree of control that the State of Israel has over the border crossings between it and the Gaza Strip; and also from the situation that was created between the State of Israel and the Gaza Strip territory due to years of Israeli military control in the area, as a result of which the Gaza Strip is at this time almost totally dependent on Israel for its supply of electricity”.
This Supreme Court’s decision, Gisha said at the end of January, “is a dramatic departure from the court’s precedent applying the laws of occupation to Gaza and the West Bank”.
In the Jerusalem Post interview, Sari Bashi argued that “An economic sanction is the withholding of something that is your sovereign right, such as your choice to trade or not to trade with another country. States are allowed to do that, subject to certain restrictions. Israel is not choosing whether or not to trade with Gaza. Israel is saying that Gaza may not receive fuel and electricity from anywhere else in the world, and restricting what is received through its borders. The European Union is buying 100% of the industrial diesel fuel for Gaza‘s power plant. This is a humanitarian donation project. But, if the EU were to bring canisters of industrial diesel on a ship and try to dock it in Gaza, Israel‘s navy would sink the ship. If the EU were to fly it in by plane, the Israeli air force would shoot down the plane. Israel requires the EU to bring the industrial diesel through the Nahal Oz border crossing. This is not trade. This is a blockade in which Israel decides the terms under which people may bring humanitarian goods through the blockade. This is unprecedented. Furthermore, between Israel and Gaza there are specific obligations. Gaza is occupied territory under international law. This means that Israel owes positive obligations to actively facilitate the provision of humanitarian services and the functioning of normal life in Gaza. The reason for this is control. Israel controls the funding of public services in Gaza, through its control of the tax moneys collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. These are the tax moneys that pay public servants in Gaza. Israel also controls the Palestinian population registry, determining who is a resident of Gaza, who may live there, who may enter. And Israel controls Gaza‘s borders: land, air and sea. That control creates responsibility”.