About:
- The West Bank is the name given to the territory that was captured by Jordan after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Israel snatched it back during the Six Day War of 1967, and has occupied it ever since.
- The West Bank is a landlocked territory near the Mediterranean coast of Western Asia, bordered by Jordan to the east and by the Green Line separating it and Israel on the south, west and north. The West Bank also contains a significant section of the western Dead Sea shore.
Israeli settlements in West Bank:
- Israel has built formal and informal settlements in the West Bank over the last 20-25 years. Over 4 lakh Israeli settlers now live here, along with some 26 lakh Palestinians.
- The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the UN Security Council (UNSC), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have said that the West Bank settlements are violative of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
- Under the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”.
- Under the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court in 1998, such transfers constitute war crimes, as does the “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”.
- Under the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, both Israel and the Palestinians agreed that the status of settlements would be decided by negotiations. But the negotiations process has been all but dead for several years now.
- Most of the world’s nations look at it as occupied territory.
