Another international law violation

It never fails.

Every time Israel implements a certain policy, there is a strategic objective behind it.

This time, the increase in violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — due to Israelis’ provocations — seems to be giving Israel a pretext to implement a master plan it wanted to execute all along.

This was made clear by a senior Israeli defence official who disclosed, on Friday, on Israel’s Channel 10 television that “if the terrorist attacks continue, we will begin deporting the families of terrorists to the Gaza Strip!”

The transfer policy has always been on Israel’s agenda, hidden or overt. Israel wants nothing more than to rid the West Bank of Palestinians, but since they refuse to just go away, Israel resorts to killing and deportations.

Israel’s long-term design on the West Bank cannot succeed as long as native Palestinians continue to live there.

That has been made obvious by the decades of occupation and hardship that failed to make the Palestinians vanish.

To counter that, as much as possible, Israel resorts to all sorts of machinations: it revokes residency permits of Palestinians and their families in Jerusalem who it accuses of committing acts of violence against Israelis, it refuses to give construction permits, it imprisons Palestinians at whim, deports and “transfers” them or outright kills them.

Israel claims that this policy of mass expulsion will serve as a deterrent against Palestinian uprisings, when in fact it has the sinister objective of emptying the West Bank and East Jerusalem of their indigenous population.

The crime of transfer is well recognised in international humanitarian law; it is considered a serious offence, included by the four Geneva Conventions and the Rome ICC Statute.

Israel should think twice before it puts this collective form of punishment into practice.

It cannot move the entire population, but it might move the international community into action, and it will definitely not help any effort to attain peace between Israelis and Palestinians.