A/HRC/40/74 10. The commission thanks all those who provided information, in particular victims and witnesses. III. Applicable law 11. Both Israel and the State of Palestine are party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, other core international human rights treaties and the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and are bound by customary international law. Within Gaza, the de facto authorities led by Hamas bear human rights obligations given their exercise of government-like functions. 12. Israel and Palestinian organized armed groups (Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades and Al Quds Brigades, the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad respectively), as parties to the armed conflict, are bound by international humanitarian law. As the occupying Power, Israel is also bound by the rules on occupation under international treaty and customary law. 13. Substantively, the commission assessed whether these duty bearers respected, protected and fulfilled the right to life, the freedom of peaceful assembly and the freedom of expression, among other rights. IV. Context and background 14. The “great march” entailed weekly demonstrations by Palestinians near the fence that since 1996 has separated Gaza and Israel (along the Green Line traced by the armistice agreements of 1949), demanding that the blockade imposed on Gaza be lifted and the return of Palestinian refugees. A. Blockade 15. Gaza is home to 2 million people – half of whom are children – living in a coastal strip 42 km long, with a population density that is one of the highest in the world. Their access to the outside world and to the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory is extremely limited owing to movement restrictions imposed by Israel since the early 1990s, increasing in the 2000s and maintained after Israel withdrew its settlements from Gaza in 2005. After Hamas3 won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, in June 2007 Israel declared Gaza “hostile territory” and imposed an air, land and sea blockade in a campaign of “economic warfare”. 16. By 2015, the Israeli blockade and restrictions on entry and exit of goods and people had halved the GDP of Gaza and reduced it to a humanitarian case of profound aiddependency, with the world’s highest unemployment rate (54 per cent overall, with 70 per cent youth unemployment) and 68 per cent of the population rendered food insecure. The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross have both found that the blockade constitutes collective punishment. 17. In 2017, the United Nations warned that Gaza would become “unliveable”, pointing to an ever-deepening water, electricity, health, education and food crisis resulting from the blockade.4 3 4 Hamas describes itself as a “Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement”, and includes a political party and an armed wing (see http://hamas.ps/en/post/678/a-document-of-generalprinciples-and-policies). Hamas or its armed wing is listed as a terrorist organization by Australia, Canada, the European Union, Israel, New Zealand and the United States of America. “Gaza: Ten Years Later”, United Nations Country Team in the occupied Palestinian Territory, July 2017. 3