A/HRC/25/67 basic the denial and lack of protection of Palestinian children’s rights is under the Israeli military legal regime. By comparison, Israeli settler children in conflict with the law are subject to regular Israeli law. According to Defence for Children International, as at October 2013, 159 Palestinian children were in Israeli military detention.78 On average, around 700 children are detained and prosecuted per year, most commonly on charges of throwing stones.79 65. The regular denial by Israel of the right to life and liberty of significant numbers of Palestinians is reflected in its policies, laws and practices in occupied Palestine. 66. Article 2(b) refers to the imposition of living conditions calculated to cause a group’s physical destruction in whole or in part. It seems unlikely that the policies, laws and practices of Israel can be said to have as their aim the physical destruction of the occupied people.80 67. Article 2(c) concerns measures calculated to prevent participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the full development of a racial group, including and especially by denying them their rights to work, to education, to leave and to return to their country, to nationality, and to freedoms of movement and residence, opinion and expression, and peaceful assembly and association. 68. Violations of many of these rights have already been touched on in preceding sections. For instance the violations by Israel of the rights to work, education, freedom of movement and residence, and freedom of expression and assembly have been illustrated in the context of discussing the wall and its associated regime, and policies and laws related to the development of settlements, including in East Jerusalem. The rights to work, to freedom of movement, and to leave and return to one’s country, are particularly relevant to Gaza. In the West Bank, the denial of rights to Palestinians is made possible by the existence of parallel legal systems operating in the same territory: one set of civil and criminal laws for Israeli settlers and another for Palestinian Arabs, subject to Israeli military orders, as well as other laws. While the Israeli High Court of Justice formally exercises judicial oversight of the Israeli administration in occupied Palestine, according to NGOs, case law illustrates a trend whereby major policy decisions of government, e.g. relating to the wall and settlements, tend to be immune from judicial intervention, and that human rights and protection under international humanitarian law have not been adequately upheld by the High Court in its rulings.81 The creation of Israeli legal zones for settlers and the resulting segregation was noted in the 2013 report by the independent fact-finding mission on settlements (A/HRC/22/63). The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 2012 expressed that it was “extremely concerned” at policies and practices amounting to de facto segregation and that it was “particularly appalled at the hermetic character of the separation of the two groups” (CERD/C/ISR/CO/14-16, para. 24). 69. It is clear that Israeli measures, in the form of policies, laws and practices, have the effect of preventing Palestinians from full participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of Palestine and arguably also prevent their full development in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 78 79 80 81 18 See www.dci-palestine.org/content/child-detainees. See www.addameer.org/etemplate.php?id=296. The United Nations has questioned whether Gaza will be a liveable place in 2020 (“Gaza in 2020: A Liveable Place?” 2012). Considering the situation in Gaza, the Russell Tribunal found that Israeli policies aimed at causing displacement of Palestinians, rather than their physical destruction. Information from Diakonia.