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For those who are interested in the connection between the flaws of the Oslo Accords and the failure to explicitly incorporate the 4th Geneva Convention within the Accords, I strongly recommend the excellent article “Flouting Convention: The Oslo Agreements” [The New Intifada (2001), p. 181-206] by Allegra Pacheco. On p. 186, Pacheco claims that “one of the greatest flaws of the Oslo agreements was that they did not commit Israel to (explicitly) abide by the (4th Geneva) Convention and cease its human rights violations”. On p. 188, she gives the background for that omission (worth reading in full):
It should be noted that Palestinian Human Rights groups valiantly tried to independently force the applicability of the Convention by appealing to the International Community (see p. 199 -201). These attempts yielded a “call for the convening of a meeting of the parties to consider enforcement measures of the Convention in the Occupied Territories”, as requested by UNGA resolution ES-10/6 (passed unanimously on February 9 1999), which resulted in a truncated 10 minute conference of the High Contracting Parties (to the 4th Geneva Convention) on July 15 1999 that still managed to reaffirm “the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the Occupied Palestinian Territory”. This was then followed by another conference of the High Contracting Parties on December 5 2001 and that issued a more detailed statement, again re-affirming the applicability of the 4th Geneva Convention.
Despite these attempts, Israel continued (and continues) to refuse the applicability of the 4th Geneva Convention to the OPT, and by extension, its applicability to the settlements in the OPT. It is not surprising, then, to see the avoidance of any mention of the 4th Geneva Convention in the successor to the Oslo Accords, the so-called Quartet Roadmap, which like Oslo, purposefully fails to incorporate standards of International Humanitarian Law (including the 4th Geneva Convention) within its text.