Palestinian communities are being divided and destroyed by Israel’s so-called ‘Security Fence’, but more appropriately the "Apartheid Wall". It is clear that the wall has very little to do with security and much more to do with an aggressive and illegal land grab.
The wall cuts deep within and annexes 22% of the West Bank. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, it will be 687 kms. Long, and will leave 274,000 Palestinians, living in 122 towns and villages, either surrounded by the wall or trapped between the wall and the pre-1967 ‘Green Line’, the 1949 Armistice Agreement line, and thus requiring an Israeli permit to live in their own homes. The wall is destroying thousands of acres of farmland, uprooting hundreds of thousands of trees, demolishing homes and leaving thousands of families landless, jobless, hungry and hopeless. A large number of towns and villages are encircled by an 8-10 metres high concrete wall with trenches, electric fences, sensors, cameras, military patrols and armed watchtowers.
Uri Avnery, the Israeli author and former Knesset member, described this wall accurately: " It is inhuman. The planners completely ignored the existence of non-Jewish human beings. They took into account settlements and bypass roads but they totally ignored the Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages, their inhabitants and fields, as if they did not exist. And so the wall stands between, children and their school, students and their university, patients and their doctor, parents and their children, villages and their wells and between peasants and their fields….. For the planners these lives simply do not exist. The country is empty of non-Jews…
A state that surrounds itself with a Wall is nothing but a ghetto-state. A strong ghetto, for sure, an armed ghetto, a ghetto that frightens everybody in the neighbourhood, but a ghetto nevertheless."
This says it all about the Wall. Its construction and location are a grave breach of international law, as articulated by the Fourth Geneva Convention, and thus constitutes a war crime.