Wed 25 December 2019:
Nearly 8,000 Palestinians have been prevented from travelling abroad by occupying Israeli forces, a Palestinian rights group said on Tuesday.
According to The Center for Defense of Liberties and Civil Rights, known as Hurryyat in Arabic, Israeli authorities stopped 7984 Palestinains from travelling over the past five years.
Nine percent of those affected by the travel bans were women.
In 2019 alone, 310 travel bans were documented, seven of which were against women.
Hurryyat added the statistic of total bans is much higher as it only takes individual travel bans into consideration.
Israel has previously imposed collective travel bans on Palestinians that sometimes affected an entire governorate. In 2014, all of the Hebron governorate was subjected to a ban.
The travel bans have happened in the midst of a brutal occupation and a spike in illegal settlement activity.
Israel has illegally occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem since a war with neighbouring Arab countries in 1967. It later annexed east Jerusalem in a move never recognised by the international community.
Israeli forces and settlers routinely attack Palestinians in the occupied territories, demolishing their homes, poisoning their livestock and vandalising properties.
The Israeli occupation routinely uses barriers and checkpoints to restrict Palestinian freedom of movement, as it expands its occupation of the West Bank via settlements.
All Israeli settlements across the occupied West Bank are classed as illegal under international law, particularly Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which asserts that “the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”.
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