Introduction 17 These policies have been hugely detrimental to the Palestinian population in the West Bank. Since the occupation began in 1967, “Israel has not permitted the establishment of any new Palestinian municipalities. Instead, Israel has used its authority under military orders to confine the boundaries of existing municipalities to geographical areas delineated by the British in the 1940s”.70 This is “[d]espite the enormous growth of the Palestinian population since 1967”.71 Military Order 418 created a planning regime that affords “maximum control [to] the Israeli government...over all aspects of planning and development in the Palestinian communities”.72 For example, “[i]n the 1990s, Israel drew up detailed perimeter plans for some 400 Palestinian villages in the West Bank…essentially limiting [them] to their existing boundaries and prohibiting any development beyond them”.73 As a result of these combined policies, Areas A and B are “drastically fragmented and interspersed with, and encircled on all side by, vast areas of Israeli control[led]” Area C.74 Finally, the transfer of planning functions to the Palestinian National Authority under the Interim Agreement in Areas A and B has done nothing to mitigate the containment and concentration of the Palestinian population in the West Bank. This is because the perimeters of the Israeli controlled Area C have been in large part determined by reference to the boundaries which exist under the various outline plans described above i.e. those boundaries which have been in large part responsible for this process in the first place. The Gaza Strip provides the starkest illustration of Israel’s policy of concentrating and containing the Palestinian population. Despite its ‘disengagement’ from Gaza in 2005, Israel’s policy of further restricting Palestinian land-use continues. This is accomplished by enforcing a ‘buffer zone’ inside of Gaza’s border with Israel. A recent report highlights that this buffer zone “extends over approximately 17 percent of the territory of the Gaza Strip”.75 This necessarily means that the population density figures for the Gaza Strip are in fact far higher than those reported. The report notes that, “depending on the specific area, farmers are effectively prevented from accessing land located up to 1,000-1,500 meters from the fence”,76 no small distance relative to the width of Gaza itself. Furthermore, “since it is estimated that approximately 95 percent of the restricted area is arable land, the buffer zone... extends over 30 percent of the Gaza Strip’s agricultural land.”77 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 97. BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 97. Bimkom, The Prohibited Zone: The Israeli Planning Policy in the Palestinian Villages in Area C, 39. BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 99. BADIL and COHRE, Ruling Palestine, 121. Al-Haq, Shifting Paradigms: Israel’s Enforcement of the Buffer Zone in the Gaza Strip (Ramallah, 2011), 7. Al-Haq, Shifting Paradigms, 6. Al-Haq, Shifting Paradigms, 6.