AMMAN —
Foreigners will have to declare whether they have family, property, or
inheritance in the
West Bank when visiting the Palestinian territory starting
in May 2022, according to new guidelines published by the Israeli government.
اضافة اعلان
In addition,
Israeli officials will now be able to demand that visitors hand over a
financial deposit of up to 70,000 shekels (JD 15,090) upon entering, which will
be returned once “compliance with the terms of the resident permit has been
verified, or the foreigner has departed.”
Palestinian lawyer
Ahmed Abufoul wrote that the new declaration form “racially discriminates”
against people of Palestinian origin.
“The information
Israel gathers from Palestinian (sic) relating to their property in the
occupied West Bank has no reasonable relationship to their entry and is likely
to be used to adversely affect their vested and non-vested property interests
given Israel’s settlement enterprise,” Abufoul, legal research and advocacy
officer at the Palestinian rights organization Al-Haq, declared in a Twitter
post on Tuesday.
Relatives of
Palestinians, businesspeople, investors, and journalists seeking to visit the
West Bank will be required to enter from Jordan via the King Hussein Bridge.
Those visitors will only be allowed to enter from Israel via Ben Gurion Airport
in “exceptional” circumstances, with advanced approval from Israeli
authorities.
The guidelines do
not mention foreign tourists, but state that they will “not apply to foreigners
asking to visit the area (the West Bank) and Israel in parallel.”
The Coordinator of
Government Activities in the Territories, the Israeli occupation authority in
the Palestinian territories, quietly published the updated guidelines online in
February 2022.
Israeli newspaper
Haaretz reported on the guidelines in March 2022, noting that they were written
as human rights lawyers petitioned Israeli authorities to ease restrictions on
visiting the Palestinian territories. Instead, Israel tightened those
restrictions.
The Haaretz report
noted that only 100 foreign teachers and 150 foreign students will be allowed
to study at
Palestinian universities at a time. However, the report did not
mention the new property declaration requirements.
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