Dear friends,

The day-to-day work of defending human rights is often frustrating, sometimes even heartbreaking, as we witness the suffering around us. As I write to you now, violence and collective punishments are increasing and we are all worried what the next few weeks will bring. So we take some strength and encouragement from a review of our work over the past year. In 2022, some 6,000 people turned to HaMoked for assistance, and in the majority of cases, we succeeded in helping them: locating family members in detention, enabling farmers to continue cultivating their land, reuniting families, and ensuring that people can travel freely and live in their homes without fear of deportation.  You can see the full breakdown of our cases below.

Alongside the individual assistance, HaMoked also works for broader changes, filing strategic litigation, supplemented with research and advocacy, in order to challenge government and military policies that violate human rights. Success is more sporadic on this level, but in 2022, we managed to overturn harsh restrictions on access to farmlands beyond the Separation Wall, benefitting thousands of farmers who were previously denied permits. We also succeeded in lifting the two-year ban on children visiting parents incarcerated inside Israel, and renewing prison visits from Gaza - both bans were arbitrarily maintained long after other Covid-19 related bans were lifted.

Our principled litigation continues on a range of topics as detailed below, including our demands to end night arrests of Palestinian children and to ensure an equal right to family unification, so that Palestinian families can live together.

Of course, the year ended with the election of an extremist Israeli government that is working to further entrench the occupation and the de-facto annexation of the West Bank, which spells a further erosion of Palestinians’ human rights. This government is also explicitly working to hinder efforts to defend Palestinians, both by undermining the independence of the Israeli judiciary and by advancing restrictions on human rights organizations like HaMoked.

In this reality, we all feel moments of despair, but we are determined to continue and even redouble our efforts, providing individual assistance to victims of human rights violations and advancing principled demands to respect Palestinians’ basic rights. This work is more important now than ever.

I take this opportunity to thank all of our partner organizations, our donors and our supporters. We could not do this work alone, and we are proud to be part of a broader community working to advance Palestinian human rights.

Sincerely,

Jessica Montell
Executive Director of HaMoked