"Building settlements in occupied territories was the single most grave error and sin in the history of modern Zionism, because it was based on a refusal to accept the simple fact that we are not alone in this country," he told me.
"The transfer, the installation of the occupying power into the occupied territories is considered as an illegal move and qualified as a 'grave breach'," said Rene Kosirnik, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation to Israel and the Palestinian territories, last week.
Allah says, "The craving for ever-greater worldly gains and to excel others in that regard keeps you occupied and which continues until you reach your graves" (Quran, 102 1 2).
The wife goes inside her grandparents' house and talks to her grandmother, to keep her occupied, while the husband carries the pieces of the grave bench into the front of the house and hides them in the closet.
Ten days earlier, the US boycotted an international conference in Geneva that once again concluded that the fourth Geneva convention applies to the occupied territories, so that many US-Israeli actions there are "grave breaches", hence serious war crimes.
But human rights activists and analysts say an act of violence against Palestinians that occurred hours earlier in a much different context — a stretch of highway in an Israeli-controlled section of the occupied West Bank — has become a test case for an equally grave problem: rising attacks by radical Israeli settlers on Palestinians and their property.
Under the founding statute of the I.C.C., grave violations of the Geneva Conventions, including civilian settlements in occupied territories, are considered war crimes.
Even graver perhaps, this system has allowed Israel to establish civilian settlements for its own people in the occupied Palestinian territories.
plane into their occupied land.
