Grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention The Fourth Geneva Convention states that “if committed against persons or property protected by the present Convention,” wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer, wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, will be considered grave breaches of the Convention.374 As shown throughout the chapters of this Working Paper, Israel is not only responsible for committing individual acts that constitute grave breaches, but also of carrying out those acts in such a systematic and widespread manner that they amount to an official policy. The wilful killings at the hands of Israeli forces have been extensively documented during the past decades, as has been the ongoing policy of torture and inhuman treatment to which Palestinian prisoners are subjected to in Israeli prisons. In the context of the use of excessive force, examples of wilfully causing suffering or serious injury to body can be found all across the oPt. The policy of administrative detention as well as the arbitrary arrests constitutes a systematic deprivation of the right to a fair and regular trial for Palestinian prisoners, who often spend years in jail without charges or evidence brought against them. The three wars in the Gaza Strip are a case in point of extensive destruction of property not only unjustified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully, but that it may have rendered the Gaza Strip uninhabitable by 2020, as reported by the UN.375 The Additional Protocol I of 1977 also establishes “practices of apartheid and other inhuman and degrading practices involving outrages upon personal dignity, based on racial discrimination” as a grave breach.376 The Geneva Conventions state that “No High Contracting Party shall be allowed to absolve itself or any other High Contracting Party of any liability incurred by itself or by another High Contracting Party in respect of [the aforementioned] breaches.”377 These grave breaches, therefore, confer an obligation on state signatories to “enact domestic penal legislation, search 374 Geneva Convention IV, Article 147 375 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Report on UNCTAD assistance to the Palestinian people: Developments in the economy of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 6 July 2015. Available at: http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdb62d3_en.pdf 376 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977, Article 85(4)(c) 377 Geneva Convention IV, Article 148 102