This Palestinian couple decided to start their marriage contact at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, south of the occupied West Bank, an archeological mosque which the Israeli occupation authorities and settlers are trying to take over. (Twitter Quds News Network)
Sat 03 September 2022:
Israeli authorities have issued a new regulation requesting that foreigners notify them if they fall in love with a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank.
The new regulations, which are set to take effect on Monday, stipulate that after 27 months of marriage, a couple must leave the area for an additional 1.5 years to cool off, BBC reported.
Additionally, it requires foreigners to notify Israeli authorities after 30 days of beginning a relationship with a holder of a Palestinian ID.
The rules also further complicate and formalise written and unwritten entry restrictions for foreigners wishing to visit, do business, reunite and reside with their Palestinian families, work or volunteer in the West Bank, or study or teach at Palestinian academic institutions.
Foreign-passport holding Palestinians must provide information – for visa purposes – on an application for approval prior to travel, which includes the names and national ID numbers of “first-degree” relatives, or other non-relatives with whom they may stay or visit.
Palestinians who are out of this inhumane ID system must now report to the Israeli authorities the details of their first-degree relatives and people they plan to visit in the West Bank.
So even if you live abroad, Israel still wants to know your network and social circles.
— Marwa Fatafta مروة فطافطة (@marwasf) April 26, 2022
Digital rights experts say that personal information on travellers and their families and acquaintances is likely to be used in Israel’s mass surveillance and data collection efforts.
“It’s a surveillance exercise,” said Marwa Fatafta, a Palestinian digital rights expert and Al Shabaka policy analyst. “With the new policy, Israeli authorities want to map out the social circles and property of Palestinians who live abroad with foreign passports.”
“The entire identification system is built to control the most two crucial aspects of Palestine: people and land. Now, in a way, it will also apply to Palestinians with ties to the West Bank,” she told Al Jazeera.
Palestinians with foreign passports must also state whether they own property or stand to inherit some in the West Bank. No reasons are given as to why this information is necessary in order to process an entry application.
Palestinians and Israeli NGOs have criticized the laws, accusing the Israeli government of “taking restrictions to a new level”, as they are perceived as an effort to tighten limits on foreigners who live in or seek to visit the West Bank.
Apart from that, new restrictions have been imposed on Palestinian universities, limiting a quota for 150 student visas and 100 foreign lecturers, while there are no such limits in the Israeli ones.
“This is about demographic engineering of Palestinian society and isolating Palestinian society from the outside world,” Jessica Montell, executive director of the Israeli non-governmental organisation HaMoked, which has petitioned the Israeli High Court against the regulations, told BBC.
“They make it much more difficult for people to come and work in Palestinian institutions, volunteer, invest, teach and study,” she added.
These new regulations are a part of the 97-page directive submitted by the Israel defense ministry’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (Cogat).
Cogat is in charge of overseeing Palestinian territorial governance.
The order is titled ‘Procedure for entry and residence of foreigners in the Judea and Samaria area’— the biblical name Israel uses for the West Bank.
The order was initially issued in February, but it wasn’t officially announced until now.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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