In a statement on Friday, Bachelet pointed to data from the International Press Institute showing there have been nearly 40 journalists arrested around the world for reports critical of states’ responses to the pandemic or for questioning the accuracy of official numbers of cases and deaths. She said:
Some States have used the outbreak of the new coronavirus as a pretext to restrict information and stifle criticism. A free media is always essential, but we have never depended on it more than we do during this pandemic, when so many people are isolated and fearing for their health and livelihoods. Credible, accurate reporting is a lifeline for all of us.
This is no time to blame the messenger. Rather than threatening journalists or stifling criticism, States should encourage healthy debate concerning the pandemic and its consequences. People have a right to participate in decision-making that affects their lives, and an independent media is a vital medium for this.
Being open and transparent, and involving those affected in decision-making builds public trust and helps ensure that people participate in measures designed to protect their own health and that of the wider population and increases accountability.
At the same time, the pandemic has highlighted issues of incompetence and lack of leadership in ruling elites across the world. It is increasingly clear that many political leaders underestimated the threat of the outbreak in China and chose to placate markets instead of preparing their nations for an emergency. Others - in South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and elsewhere - took adequate action, communicated transparently with the public and managed to avoid a national disaster.
This revelatory aspect of the pandemic is what makes it particularly dangerous to populist strongmen across the world. They are now at a growing risk of being exposed for who they are - incompetent leaders who do little more than satisfy the interests of narrow business circles around them, while leaving their nations to economic precarity and social insecurity.
These populists have been promoting hate-based agendas to manipulate the public, all while denying the pressing emergencies of our times. This is evident in their indifference toward climate change and refugee crises and in their responses to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. This global health crisis requires global collaboration, responsibility and solidarity, which goes against everything they stand for, and it is moving too fast for their populist rhetorical strategies to work.
In response, "strongmen" have doubled down on racism in their rhetoric and sought to undermine traditional vectors of authority and legitimation that are necessary to understand facts. Government agencies, the media and credentialled academics are needed to convince the public of the significance and implications of the bare facts of the pandemic. They have all been relentlessly attacked and questioned by populist politicians who are desperately trying to distract public attention away from the catastrophic consequences of their inaction.
At the same time, neo-fascists leaders have launched desperate efforts to try to instrumentalise the pandemic to consolidate power and/or ensure their re-election.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Victor Orban declared a state of emergency on March 11. Less than three weeks later the Parliament voted in a law allowing him to rule indefinitely by decree in the name of combating the coronavirus. But these powers go far beyond what is necessary to fight the outbreak as they include provisions for jail sentences for anyone found to have obstructed anti-pandemic measures or spread false information.
Orban is clearly trying to preclude potential public anger over his mishandling of the crisis loosening his grip on power. Even before the pandemic, the Hungarian health system was in bad shape; controversial measures taken to free up beds for COVID-19 patients and inadequate supply of protective gear and equipment for hospitals have cast further doubt on the Hungarian government's strategy to handle the crisis. There has also been criticism of government spending on non-essential sectors, including sports.
When 25 of Brasil's 27 governors signed a joint letter demanding Bolsonaro back strict anti-outbreak measures, he accused them being "job exterminators" who want to sabotage his re-election in two and a half years. Thus, instead of taking the lead on the pandemic response, the strategy of the Brazilian shortsighted President was to fire the Ministry of Health and to incite the public against local authorities and blame the looming economic crisis on them, to cover up his own mishandling of the situation and the failure of his right-wing policies to bring prosperity to Brasil.
Similarly ignorant, US President Donald Trump has focused his efforts on manipulating public opinion instead of working with state authorities to resolve the crisis. But unlike Bolsonaro, he has had to backtrack on his claims that the coronavirus outbreak does not pose a threat to the US.
After his about-face, he focused his efforts on covering up the fact that he launched a delayed response to the pandemic and has mishandled various aspects of the crisis. When Democrats and reporters accused him of messing up, he blamed the outbreak on China, the lack of a workable test on the Obama administration and the shortage of ventilators on various governors. Instead of focusing on solving these issues, he announced the suspension of all immigration into the US to protect jobs as the virus spreads.
With his eyes on re-election in November, Trump has taken over daily briefings on the pandemic from Vice President Mike Pence and transformed them into election campaigning opportunities, touting what he sees as "achievements" of his administration instead of informing the public of the state of the nation. He and the Republican Party have pushed through various measures and packages to bail out big businesses which have donated to his campaign and whose support would be essential for his re-election.
I could have added Narendra Modi and a fex others to this article. Orban, Bolsonaro and Trump are just three examples of a global trend of ignorant populist leaders mishandling national responses to the pandemic. In the end, this is not just a health crisis but one of national and global governance. It is fast becoming yet another proof of the utter failure of populism to provide anything other than empty and hateful rhetoric.
Populist leaders are dangerous in everyway and certainly cannot provide any kind of social or economic solutions to national and global problems and the pandemic is making this ever more apparent. Perhaps this tragedy will be that last straw that broke the camel's back which will bring the demise of populism across the world.
On December 31, 2019, the Chinese government informed the World Health Organization of an epidemic of animal origin in Wuhan, reporting similarities to SARS-CoV (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, originally appearing in 2002 in the province of Guangdong) and to MERS-CoV (Middle East Repiratory Syndrome, originally appearing in Saudi Arabia in 2012). On January 12, Chinese scientists shared the completely sequenced genome of this new coronavirus with the entire international scientific community.
The epidemic had already killed 80 people in China and thousands were infected. The city of Wuhan (11 million inhabitants) and the province of Hubei (60 million inhabitants the city of Wuhan included) were isolated on January 25-26. Factories, offices, stores, schools, universities, museums, and airports were all closed down.Urban transportation in the city was significantly reduced. As a precaution, the authorities extended the Chinese New Year vacation by one week (January 23-31) to cover the incubation period for the virus among the inhabitants of Wuhan who left the city and could have been infected. They set up shelter hospitals (“fangcang”) in gymnasiums, conference centers, hotels, and other facilities to separate the symptomatic and the likely-infected from their healthy relatives. With the number of ill people exceeding local hospital capacity, the authorities set up two 1,200-bed hospitals in fifteen days and summoned medical and voluntary nursing personnel from all over China. More than 42,000 healthcare personnel responded.
Despite the use of Personal Protective Equipment, 4.4% of them (3,387) had tested positive and 23 had died as of April 3 according to the Chinese Red Cross. The lockdown was strict and neighborhood committees were mobilized to ensure food deliveries to the inhabitants. Masks were requisitioned and distributed to the population. Street fixtures and furniture were disinfected, even banknotes were disinfected. The average age of the ill was 55 and 56% of them were men. No case of infection was reported in anyone under the age of 15.
All this information was shared in international medical journals by Chinese doctors and researchers starting on February 20. The creation of hospitals ex nihilo in the space of a fortnight was given ample coverage in the media but the French authorities did not appreciate the gravity of the implications: they preferred to view the initiative as the Chinese marketing their public works. In mid-January, COVID-19 cases were recorded in Bangkok, Tokyo, and Seoul. Thermal sensors were installed in the airports of China, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. On January 26, the authorities in Hong Kong cancelled all sports and cultural events. A testing campaign began in the city on February 18.
And what of France? On January 24, the Ministry of Health announced that three patients coming from China had been hospitalized with the coronavirus. The French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) outlined two scenarios for the spread of COVID-19: one high-risk, the other low-risk. Given air traffic, the countries estimated to be the most exposed were Germany and the United Kingdom. Italy was not even mentioned. The Minister of Health, Agnès Buzyn, commented on the INSERM scenarios that same day as she left the Council of Ministers: “the risk of secondary infection from an imported case is very low and the risk of propagation of the virus in the population is also very low.”
On January 30, France repatriated 250 French citizens and 100 European immigrants from Wuhan, putting them in quarantine in southern France. On February 10, a British citizen coming from Singapore infected five other people in the small Alpine ski resort of Contamines-Montjoie. A summary screening did not detect other cases at the resort. The infected were hospitalized. Buzyn reminded us on that occasion that “the risk of infection is very low; only close and sustained contact with an infected person can increase it.”
At that point, with 900 reported dead in China, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made clear reference to the danger of global propagation, “we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg.”
But in France the authorities—duly warned but strangely untroubled—took no particular measures. On March 6, while at the theatre with his wife, President Macron stated, “Life goes on. There is no reason, except for the more vulnerable members of the population, to change our outing habits.”] His aim was to encourage the French to continue to go out despite the coronavirus epidemic and the lack of protective masks. That same day, the Italian government decided to lock down Lombardy, extending the provision to the entire country the following day. While Macron was enjoying the performance, there were 613 cases of coronavirus in France and the number was doubling every three days (roughly the same rate recorded by Chinese physicians in Wuhan in January and seen in South Korea and Italy). Extrapolating this exponential growth, it could be estimated that on March 16 there would be approximately 6,500 cases; the final official figure was 6,633.
The French government was all focused on the pension reform, president Macron’s top priority. Protests were organized in all French cities: retirees, railway workers, physicians, lawyers, fire fighters, and students all took to the streets. The demonstrations were violently suppressed by the police. Economists were in unanimous agreement—a rare event—that the proposed reform would harm all categories of worker except those in the upper income brackets. Sociologists warned the government about the deepening social schisms, as had been thrust into the public eye earlier with the 12 months revolt of the gilets jaunes [yellow vests]. These protests had been staged every Saturday for nearly a year in all cities in France, drawing in a broad range of the hardest-hit social and occupational categories, a large portion of whom were pensioners.
But all for naught: on Saturday afternoon, February 29, with the chamber of the Assemblée nationale -where the debate on the bill was taking place—almost empty because of the of the day, the government seized the opportunity of the COVID-19 pandemic to pass pension reform by constitutional decree. On that date, gatherings of more than 900 people were prohibited because of COVID-19. The authorities no longer risked protests by the people in the street.
But the Macron administration did not stop there. Against the advice of the medical team and the stadium manager, it authorized a Juventus–Olympique Lyonnais football match for the Round of 16 in the Champions League. Three thousand Italian fans were in Lyon on February 26: at that time Italy had 21 coronavirus deaths and 900 people infected. Dr. Marcel Garrigou-Grandchamp, who had warned the new Minister of Health on the morning of the match, published an opinion piece on the website of the Fédération des Médecins de France on March 31, where he spoke of an “explosion” in coronavirus cases in the Département du Rhône some two weeks after the OL–Juventus match. A similar sequence of events had taken place in Italy with the Atalanta B.C. – Valencia match on February 19, termed a “bomba biologica” by many Italian physicians. It was March 4, fifteen days after the match, that the number of cases in the Lombard city of Bergamo exploded, making it the most heavily impacted city in Italy. Walter Ricciardi, Italian representative to the WHO, acknowledged that the match had been a “catalyst for the propagation of the virus”. The Paris-Nice 8-stage professional cycling race was held as scheduled from March 8th to the 15th. More significantly, the government confirmed the first phase of municipal elections on March 15, after it had ordered the closure of schools and universities on March 12 and the shutdown of most stores, bars, and restaurants on March 14.
There are 34,000 communes in France that had to organize the elections with local volunteers: volunteers and voters without adequate protection—there were no masks available. The government had requisitioned them for hospital personnel, where the shortage was critical. Half of the voters stayed home for safety’s sake. To make matters worse, Agnès Buzyn announced her candidacy for mayor of Paris on February 16, less than one month before the election, to take the place of the government’s candidate, Benjamin Griveaux, who had been discredited when an explicit video he had sent to a young woman was posted online. Buzyn left the Ministry of Health in the middle of the Coronavirus crisis. The healthcare workers who had organized numerous strikes over the previous eleven months to protest the deterioration of public hospitals felt belittled. Losing by a wide margin, Buzyn declared in an interview for Le Monde that the election had been a “masquerade”. The lockdown was not ordered until the day after the elections, politique oblige.
The new Minister of Health, Olivier Vérant, a member of parliament with the party in power, took up the government’s mantra, one that every minister and secretary of state is expected to chant in unison: “masks are useless, the tests are unreliable”. They all swear by handwashing and lockdowns. No reference is made to the way things had been handled in Seoul, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, where free masks were distributed and people were required to wear them, and large-scale testing was carried out, and where economic life goes on, in slow motion, but it goes on. Today, with 23 million inhabitants, Taiwan has recorded 6 COVID-19 deaths; Hong Kong, with 7 million inhabitants, has lost 4. As for the French doctors who were in Wuhan working alongside their Chinese colleagues and thus well informed, they were not even consulted.
The borders remain open. President Macron refuses to close the border with Italy, which the leader of the Rassemblement National party, Marine Le Pen has been demanding since February 26. For the Head of State, the problem posed by the epidemic “can only be resolved through perfect European and international cooperation.” The events of the following days would quickly contradict this wishful thinking. Every country has closed in on itself. But not France. There are no health controls at French airports, train stations, or ports. Not even today, April 18, 2020, when the official death toll has reached 18,000. In the worksite next to my home, Italian workmen come to work, without protective equipment, every morning on the 7:35 train from Ventimiglia, getting off at the Gare d’Eze: no checks when they depart, no checks when they arrive. Italy has now officially recorded more than 23,660 deaths. On its April 18 evening newscast, the television station Antenne 2 aired the report by journalist Charlotte Gillard, who had taken an Air France flight from Paris to Marseille: the plane was packed, not a free seat, the passengers did not have masks, no one’s temperature was checked on either departure or arrival.
The fact is that France currently has no stores of masks or test kits. For economic reasons—annual savings of 30 million euros—the country’s strategic stocks were depleted in 2012 and never replenished. On the eve of 2020, when the coronavirus epidemic began to spread, France’s supplies consisted of zero FFP2 masks, 117 million adult surgical masks, and 40 million pediatric masks! The hospitals are experiencing critical mask shortages. The nursing staff in retirement homes have no protection (no gloves, no masks, no sanitizing gel). There is no more sanitizing gel available in pharmacies or stores. Doctors and nurses do not have the equipment they need. As for hospitals, they have neither enough beds nor enough ventilators to adequately cope with the epidemic. I, myself, have been to the Saint Antoine hospital in Paris last Week and saw quite a few people without masks, and there was no masks availables for patients who came to the hospital for some other treatment than codiv-19. And I'm talking about what the statistics show as the best hospital in France.
The French authorities do not admit it publicly. And they seem to drag their feet for reasons that are impossible to grasp. They were careless. They did not expect this. And when it began to materialize, they denied it for reasons that can only be called conceit, a traditional mark of distinction among the French political elite. The French regions authorities, realizing the government deficiencies, order and purchase their supplies directly from China. When they arrive, they are requisitioned by the state: thus 4 million masks that were ordered from China by Bourgogne-Franche-Comté for the nursing staff in its retirement homes were confiscated on the tarmac of the Basel-Mulhouse airport by the police on April 4, using methods that would make a gangster blush. As for the rare mayors who have stocks of personal protective equipment and graciously make them available to the local population, requiring the use of masks, they are taken to court by the Ministry of the Interior, which wants to preserve its royal prerogatives. On April 16, the Council of State, the highest administrative body in France, asserted its regal status by limiting the power of mayors. The decision calls to mind its role in 1942-1944 during the Vichy regime. It stays true to itself; it serves the State, not the Nation.
The nurses in the intensive care units in Paris hospitals report that given the shortage of beds and ventilators, they are essentially practicing battlefield medicine. This means there is a triage among the sick, choosing between those considered too old and those the doctors feel have a better chance of recovery.[ It is no coincidence that the two European countries least afflicted by the pandemic are well-equipped Austria and Germany, which have not, so far, experience a shortage of beds or ventilators. In France, veterinarians are lending their ventilators to hospitals! Instead of nationalizing private clinics as they have done in Ireland, they transport patients long distances in medical trains, helicopters, or buses to less congested hospitals in the province or abroad (Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg), increasing the possibility of infecting healthcare personnel and the risk of death. The statistics are biased because patients over the age of 75 do not have access to the ICU services: this is a sad fact for retirement homes.
In its decision of April 15 on the screening and protection of the elderly, the Council of State revealed the extent of the disaster. Assailed by associations demanding that people living in retirement homes and their caregivers be systematically tested and that protective equipment (masks, sanitizing gel) be distributed, the Council of State limited itself to reciting the paltry figures promulgated by the government (“40,000 tests per day will be available across the country by the end of April; 60,000 will be available in the weeks to come”). So in mid-May, France will be ready to do close to what Germany has already been doing since a month and a half: 500,000 tests per week. As for masks, the “current orders amount to some 50 million masks”. However, give the delivery rate, it will take nine months to receive them all.
There are 430,000 healthcare personnel and 752,000 pensioners in retirement homes and health centers. All told, there are close to a million healthcare professionals (210,000 active doctors and 700,000 nurses and nursing assistants) in France.
Under these conditions, it is clear that Macron’s announcement of the end of the lockdown and the resumption of school classes on May 11 is a gamble. If all teachers were to return to the classroom, that would mean 870,000 masks per day—reuse of masks is contraindicated. And if all the students return on this date, or even gradually, they would have to be supplied with more than 12 million masks per day.
Even with the President publicizing the “grand public” mask, a French invention no doubt handcrafted locally, the end of the lockdown on May 11 and the resumption of school classes is at best a gamble; without reliable masks to protect the entire population, it is a risky and irresponsible act. Besides, masks will be recommended, not compulsory.
The end of a health crisis that the authorities did not anticipate will be all the more painful for the French, both fiscally and socially, with the President and his administration coming out of this ordeal diminished and wholly discredited.
PALESTINA
In 2012, The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees warned that the Gaza Strip would be uninhabitable by 2020. Years of a devastating siege and a series of military conflicts taking the lives of thousands struck the enclave with misery and poverty, bringing youth unemployment up to 75% and the economy to its knees. The current healthcare and sanitary system in the Gaza strip are extremely exhausted, lack basic resources, equipment and material that would be necessary not only to fight a major pandemic, but to simply treat normal day-to-day patients. A major outbreak of COVID-19 in the Gaza strip would lead to nothing less than a disastrous effect and would likely cause a death toll higher than all previous military conflicts combined.
On March 26th, 2020, the United Nations announced that it would facilitate the delivery of a total 1200 COVID-19 testing kits to Gaza’s hospitals to help fight the outbreak. Nearly 1636 people who arrived in Gaza via the Rafah Crossing border or the Beit-Hanoun (Erez) checkpoint have been placed in mandatory quarantine in 22 centers around the Gaza Strip, including schools, hotels and healthcare centers. 505 more people are currently in confinement at home. In the Gaza strip, every individual has an average of 0.18 square meters of personal space, which would place Gazans into involuntary clusters of interconnected social networks. One person can easily transmit the disease to scores of family members and neighbors living nearby, in houses that are glued side by side to each other. At one of the most densely populated areas in the world, the average family has nearly 6 members on average and most of the population lives in extended family homes of 20 members and more. More strict measures must be taken to contain the virus or catastrophic consequences will ensue the like of which Gaza has never seen before.
When the news of confirmed cases broke out, Gazans started taking precautionary measures to protect themselves and their family members from infection. However, with the lack of sufficient resources and equipment, Gazans had only one other way to cope with stress: cynicism and dark comedy. From Facebook posts to Twitter hashtags, Gazans reacted to the irony of being advised by the Palestinian Authority not to travel, whilst living under siege and prohibited from doing so for more than a decade. Others reacted with sarcasm to isolation notices to close down businesses and shops and go into confinement, wondering how they would provide for their children when there is little commercial activity in an ailing economy, even before the arrival of the virus in the first place.
In Gaza, over 50% of the entire population is unemployed; the percentage is 75% for the youth, which renders thousands of workers in agriculture, transportation, retail, and other industries desperate (The Israeli GDP per capita is nearly 30 times that of Gaza’s). Unemployment rates are expected to rise due to major lockdowns of commercial and economic activities. Authorities in Gaza have already closed mosques for prayer, shut down events and activities involving any gathering of people; limited entry to Gaza’s seaport for fishermen under tight restrictions and closed street markets. These decisions were seen as a necessary evil to prevent a major outbreak. However, they will present a painful strike to a weak economy. In the absence of an economic rescue plan, more Gazans will suffer.
In the event of a major COVID-19 outbreak in the Gazan enclave, the numbers draw a dark picture: according to the WHO’s Gaza office, there are only 62 ventilators in the Gaza Strip. They represent far less than what is needed to fight off the virus, and many of them currently do not function properly. There are only 2313 hospital beds available for an entire population of over 2 million people, with the capacity dwindling to less than 0.5 hospital beds per 1000 individuals. This compares to over 4.6 beds in Switzerland, 3.3 beds in Italy, and 3 beds in Spain, Europe’s most affected countries by COVID-19. There are currently 60 intensive care units in the entire Strip, 40 of which are currently occupied. The cost of preparing a single intensive-care unit costs nearly $50 000. The cost of a single testing kit is almost $5000. Gazan hospitals do not currently have the financial resources to equip themselves with enough equipment and basic material such as face masks. In short, an outbreak scenario similar to that of Europe or China will be a death sentence to the Gaza strip.
The supply chain will become even more exhausted under an imminent lockdown with major logistical difficulties of transporting food items, medicine and other essentials on a daily basis to families and shops around the Strip. The negative impacts of electricity cuts and lack of accessibility to clean drinking water can be fatal as well. NGOs, private-sector corporations, self-employed workers and students have all increased their reliance on the internet to work from home or study. However, many families around the Gaza strip do not have a smartphone or an internet connection.
In order to reduce the probability of a major outbreak in the Gaza Strip, the international community needs to recognize the difficulties that lie ahead. Hamas’ authority in the Gaza Strip is currently not recognized by the U.S, the EU or Israel. The two main doors of entry into the Gaza Strip are Kerem Shalom and Erez, both of which are under full Israeli control. The Covid-19 outbreak has no consideration for borders, ideology or ethnicity. It transcends them all, it attacks all humans. Israel and Hamas must cooperate with one another to keep each other safe. Israel seems to have already understood the upcoming challenge and therefore it facilitated the entry of testing kits and other medical essential equipment over the past few days into the Gaza strip. On the other hand, Hamas recognized that there could be a political opportunity that it could seize: by proving its ability to contain the virus with responsible measures and a smart management, they could be seen as competent and more legitimate.
However, the COVID 19 outbreak has shown not only Israel and Hamas but also many advanced countries around the world that they should have invested more in healthcare and sanitary infrastructure rather than dedicating entire budgets to defense and warfare. Economic stability is an additional essential factor for containing a virus: Gaza has lost many of its professionals, particularly, doctors and nurses who emigrated abroad due to dire economic conditions.
The COVID-19 crisis has brought into stark relief the vital importance of investment in healthcare as a crucial factor in economic wellbeing at the individual and societal level. The virus knows no borders; as such, it has also underscored the imperative of mutual cooperation, which, perhaps ironically, could create political openings once considered impossible.
The UN's special Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov on Thursday said such a move would be a "devastating blow" to the internationally-backed two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the EU said annexing Palestinian territory "would constitute a serious violation of international law".
Earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his main rival Benny Gantz signed a coalition agreement that includes a clause to advance plans to annex parts of the West Bank, including Israeli settlements, starting on July 1.
Reporting from the UN, Al Jazeera's James Bays said the formation of a government in Israel has brought the question of annexation into focus.
"The new coalition government in Israel makes the prospect of the annexation of parts of the West Bank much more likely. That means that areas currently seen as occupied under international law, would be brought under Israel's sovereignty. At least that's how Israel would see it," he said.
In a video briefing with the UN Security Council, Mladenov warned that "the dangerous prospect of annexation by Israel of parts of the occupied West Bank is a growing threat", and said such a move would violate international law.
The envoy said annexation would also "deal a devastating blow to the two-state solution, close the door to a renewal of negotiations, and threaten efforts to advance regional peace."
Separately on Thursday, the EU's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said the bloc of 27 member countries does not recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Palestinian territory and that it will "continue to closely monitor the situation and its broader implications, and will act accordingly".
Netanyahu's pro-settler base is eager to move forward with annexation while the friendly administration of United States President Donald Trump is in office.
The White House’s long-awaited Mideast plan, unveiled earlier this year, envisions leaving parts of the West Bank under permanent Israeli control. The Palestinians have rejected the plan as biased.
Israel captured the West Bank during the 1967 Mideast war. Since then, more than 700,000 Israelis have moved into settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Most of the international community considers Israel's West Bank settlements illegal according to international law and an obstacle to a two-state solution to the conflict.
The Palestinians seek all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as part of an independent state. Annexation of West Bank settlements would infuriate the Palestinians and Israel's Arab neighbours, and eliminate any lingering hopes of establishing a viable Palestinian state.
The Netanyahu-Gantz deal stipulates that any Israeli action would need US backing, and must take into account Israel’s peace treaties with neighbouring Jordan and Egypt.
Daily Life Under Occupation
