Gisha petitions reveal the Gaza CLA’s practice of refusing permit applications due solely to the copy quality of the attached documents
August 5, 2019. Gaza residents applying for a permit to exit the Strip via Erez Crossing under Israel’s stringent criteria for Palestinian travel are required to submit the application and supporting documents to the Israeli Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA, in this case the Gaza CLA) via the Palestinian Civil Affairs Committee (PCAC) in the Strip. The CLA only accepts documents forwarded by the PCAC. The process is non-transparent to the applicants (and their lawyers, if they are being represented), and the CLA does not provide any confirmation of receipt to the applicants.
The Gaza CLA often denies applications even when they meet Israel’s criteria for exiting Gaza. In the response to applications that have been denied, the CLA may state that the application does not meet the criteria, but does not explain why. In three cases recently handled by Gisha, it became apparent only after legal proceedings on behalf of residents of the Strip that the sole reason for the denial of their permit applications was the copy quality of the documents submitted to the CLA to the support the application.
In all three cases, the CLA never told neither the PCAC nor the applicants themselves that the documents needed to be resubmitted, nor did it review the high quality copies of the same documents they had received from Gisha, representing the applicants. Instead, the applications were either outright denied or simply ignored. In the case described below, and in several others, Gisha had to petition the court against the denial of the permit or the CLA’s failure to respond to the application, only to find out that the application had not been denied for any substantive reason, but rather, due to the CLA’s arbitrary bureaucracy, which ultimately constitutes maltreatment of the applicant.
A.S. is an elderly widow who lives in the Gaza Strip. In July 2019, her older sister, who lives in Israel, was admitted to the intensive care unit at a hospital in Israel. A.S. filed three applications to the Gaza CLA to obtain a permit with which to exit Gaza and visit her ailing sister. When the CLA denied her application, Gisha sent a letter cautioning that legal action would be taken (Hebrew) on her behalf, demanding that the CLA explain the grounds for her denial. Meanwhile, A.S.’s sister had been released from hospital, but returned home in very poor health. When the CLA failed to respond to the pre-petition letter, Gisha filed an urgent petition (Hebrew) in which we argued that the state had abdicated its duty to act promptly and was violating the petitioner’s right to see her sister for what might be the last time. Gisha further argued that this was not an isolated incident but a matter of policy, emphasizing cases in which patients had passed away while their relatives were waiting for the CLA’s permission to visit them.
Immediately after the petition was filed, Gisha received the first response (Hebrew) from the CLA, stating that the documents it had received from A.S. via the PCAC were not clear and that the application was denied for this reason. As soon as this response was received, the petitioner resubmitted her application and Gisha filed an updating notice to the court (Hebrew), pointing out that the CLA had at its disposable the clear, legible copies of the documents which had been forwarded by Gisha via email before the petition was filed, and had then been annexed to the petition.
Despite this, the state filed a motion to dismiss the petition (Hebrew), claiming that the petitioner had never submitted the documents through the PCAC (the very same documents it had previously said were illegible), nor had the CLA received the documents the petitioner had hurriedly resubmitted the day before. The state ignored entirely the dire medical situation to which the documents pertained, showing that the petitioner’s sister was gravely ill with a life-threatening condition, and therefore proving that the petitioner met Israel’s criteria for a permit.
On the morning of the scheduled discussion, Gisha objected (Hebrew) to the state’s motion to dismiss the case, stressing that the Gaza CLA was seeking to avoid processing the petitioner’s application on a highly insignificant bureaucratic pretext and had ignored the circumstances of the application, which necessitated immediate approval of her permit.
At the discussion, the court urged CLA representatives to approve the application based on the clear documents they already had in their possession. Given the state’s insistence on receiving legible documents directly from the PCAC, the court demanded that they contact the committee themselves and arrange for the documents to be resubmitted. Later during the discussion, the Gaza CLA’s legal advisor received a text message confirming that the documents had been received from the PCAC in Gaza and the petitioner’s permit application was approved (Hebrew) immediately. Given how quickly the application was approved that morning, it is obvious that the supposedly illegible versions of the documents had already been reviewed and the application had been screened.
As noted, this was not the first time a permit application has been denied based on a triviality relating to the copy quality of the documents included. This was the same in the cases of another elderly woman from Gaza trying urgently to visit her sick sister in Israel, and a grandmother from the Gaza Strip who wished to attend her granddaughter’s wedding in Israel.
