Most Palestinians live in poverty

JERUSALEM: Most Palestinians in east Jerusalem, including three out of four children, live below the poverty line, an Israeli rights group said on Monday, accusing Israel of neglect and discrimination.

"A unified Jerusalem does not exist," the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in a report released as the Jewish state begins celebrations to mark the 43rd anniversary of its 1967 capture of Arab east Jerusalem.

"The truth is, two cities exist side by side," the report said, challenging Israel‘s claim that it unified the Holy City after annexing the Arab sector in a move not recognized by the international community.

Seventy-five percent of Palestinian children in east Jerusalem live in poverty compared with 45 percent of the city’s Jewish children, the report said.

"Over 95,000 children in east Jerusalem live in a perpetual state of poverty," ACRI said.

Despite the rampant poverty, only 10 percent of east Jerusalem‘s 300,000 Palestinians have access to social services, it added.

The neglect extends to just about every sector of life in the Arab sector, and ACRI blamed this on the authorities.

"Israel’s policy for the past four decades has taken concrete form as discrimination in planning and construction, expropriation of land, and minimal investment in physical infrastructure and government and municipal services," the report said.

The office of Nir Barkat, the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, told AFP it had no immediate comment on the report.

Israel has expropriated more than one-third of east Jerusalem land which was privately owned by Palestinians, on which it has built more than 50,000 homes for the Jewish population.

Virtually no permits for Palestinian housing construction have been issued for decades, there is a shortage of about 1,000 classrooms and rubbish collection is sporadic at best, as are postal services, the report said.

The annual budget allocation per elementary school child in east Jerusalem was 577 shekels ($152) compared with 2,372 shekels ($627) in west Jerusalem.

About 160,000 Palestinian residents have no suitable and legal connection to the water network and 50 kilometers of main sewage lines are lacking, the report said.

At the end of 2009 approximately 303,429 Palestinians lived in east Jerusalem, which equals around 36 percent of the city’s total population of some 835,450.

Israel claims the whole of Jerusalem as its "eternal" capital, while Palestinians see east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

The status of the Holy City, as well as that of Jewish settlements built on occupied Palestinian land, have long been among the thorniest issues in Palestinian-Israeli efforts to reach a peace deal.