User:Tiamut/sandpit

To do for DYKs

 * Rafah Zoo
 * Maftool
 * Karahan Tepe
 * Muqawama
 * Architecture in Palestine
 * Claude R. Conder

Palestine is a conventional name used, among others, to describe a geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands. It is also used to refer to the State of Palestine, the nation of the Palestinian people.

As a geographical term in its broadest application, Palestine can refer to 'ancient Palestine,' an area that includes contemporary Israel and the Palestinian territories, as well as part of Jordan, and some of both Lebanon and Syria. In classical or contemporary terms, it can refer to the area within the boundaries of what was once British Mandate Palestine (1920-1948), an area which included the Transjordan until the establishment of the Kingdom of Jordan in 1922. The term Land of Israel (Hebrew: ארץ־ישראל, Eretz Yisrael) is used to refer to the same geographic region, both narrowly or broadly defined, by Israelis, Jews and Christian Zionists, among others. Other terms for the same area include Canaan and the Holy Land.

Within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, usage of the term Palestine takes on a more political connotation, the boundaries and terminology of which are subject to deep dispute. To the Palestinian people who view Palestine as their homeland, its boundaries are those of the British Mandate excluding the Transjordan, as described in the Palestinian National Charter. The State of Israel was established as a national homeland for the Jews in three-quarters of this territory by the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and the remaining quarter, comprising the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, were occupied by Egypt and by Jordan, and later by Israel during the 1967 war.

Stateless since 1948, the Palestinian people, including the Palestinian diaspora, have been represented before the international community by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In November 1988, the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the parliament-in-exile of the PLO declared the independence of the State of Palestine, and over 100 countries have since granted Palestine diplomatic recognition as a state. Deviating from the usual criteria governing the classic definition of a state or country, the precise boundaries of Palestine have yet to be determined and full autonomy has yet to be secured. The Palestinian National Authority, established pursuant to the Oslo Accords, is an interim administrative body responsible for governance in population Palestinian centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip until final status negotiations are concluded.

Aims, strategies of PLO

 * 1964 and 1968, aims to to liberate Palestine through military struggle, switch from provoking the Arab armies to act to acting on their own
 * Hamas aim to liberate Palestine as it compares to Fatah

Status of Palestine

 * "Palestine is a country which, while non-existent on any current political map, has remained very much alive for its people, who often refer to it as a country in exile. The geographic area considered as Palestine has varied since ancient times, and covers what is now the modern state of Israel plus the West Bank area bordered by the Jordan River and that section of the Sinai known as the Gaza Strip. Part of the Turkis Ottoman Empire from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, and under a British mandate for the first half of the twentieth, Palestine's struggle for recognition of its people's political rights, including statehood, has made this country-without-a-country, a continuing flashpoint for tensions in the Middle East since the late 1920s."

Removal of bodies
After the battle ended on April 11, the IDF announced that it would not leave the Jenin camp until it had collected the bodies of the Palestinian dead. The army would not confirm Palestinian reports that dozens of bodies had been removed in military trucks, nor would it comment on whether or not there had been burials.

On the evening of April 11, footage of refrigerator trucks waiting outside the camp to transfer bodies to "terrorist cemeteries" was shown on Israeli TV. Ha'aretz reported the following day that, "'The IDF intends to bury today Palestinians killed in the West Bank camp ... The sources said two infantry companies, along with members of the military rabbinate, will enter the camp today to collect bodies. Those who can be identified as civilians will be moved to a hospital in Jenin, and then on to burial, while those identified as terrorists will be buried at a special cemetery in the Jordan Valley.'" According to another article in Ha'aretz a few days later, some of the bodies had already been removed from the camp by soldiers to a site near Jenin on April 11, but had not yet been buried; others had been buried by Palestinians during the battle in a mass grave near the hospital on the outskirts of the camp.

On April 12, in response to a petition presented by the Adalah organization, the Israeli High Court ordered the IDF to stop removing the bodies of Palestinians killed in battle until a hearing was held on the matter. The petition, signed by MKs Mohammed Barakeh and Ahmed Tibi, claimed the IDF's decision violated international law as the Jordan Valley cemetery would be a mass grave and dishonor the dead. Following the court's decision, issued by Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, the IDF stopped clearing the bodies from the camp. However, the court reversed its decision on April 14, ruling that the bodies could be removed. Israeli media reported that IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz confirmed on April 14 that the army intended to bury the bodies in the special cemetery.

On April 15, humanitarian aid organizations were granted access to the camp for the first time since the invasion had begun. Palestinian Red Crescent Society and International Committee of the Red Cross staff entered the camp accompanied by the IDF. Officials from the Red Crescent told lawyer Hassan Jabareen that the IDF did not allow them to move around the camps freely and that advanced decomposition, as well as the enormous destruction in the camp made it impossible to find and retrieve bodies without the proper equipment. That same day, Adalah and LAW, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, filed a petition, asking the Court to order the IDF to immediately hand over the bodies of Palestinians to the Red Cross or the Red Crescent, claiming that the bodies of dead Palestinians were being left to rot in the camp.

Tanya Reinhart notes that later Israeli media reports attempted to conceal and reinterpret their intention to transfer the bodies to the special cemetery in the Jordan Valley. As an example, she cites a July 17, 2002 article by Ze'ev Schiff in Ha'aretz which provided a wholly different explanation for the presence of the refrigerator trucks posted outside the city on April 11. Schiff writes, "Toward the end of the fighting, the army sent three large refrigerator trucks into the city. Reservists decided to sleep in them for their air-conditioning. Some Palestinian saw dozens of covered bodies lying in the trucks and rumors spread that the Jews had filled the trucks full of Palestinian bodies."