JERUSALEM: Now that Israel has completed its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, does it still occupy the territory? The answer lies in the eye of the beholder. Israel says no. The Palestinians say yes. The United Nations, the main arbiter in such matters, is undecided.

Confusion surrounding Gaza’s legal status will linger far beyond last Monday’s pullout of Israeli forces, which came on the heels of the evacuation of 8,500 Jewish settlers last month.

As with most issues, Israelis and Palestinians have staked out diametrically opposed positions, another sign of looming obstacles to renewed peacemaking despite hopes stirred by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” plan.

Israeli officials insist the last phase of the withdrawal, the Jewish state’s first uprooting of settlements on land the Palestinians want for a state, brings a complete end to 38 years of occupation of the tiny coastal territory.

“The cabinet has unanimously approved ... the formal cancellation of the military government in Gaza,” Sharon’s office said in a statement that officials said relieved Israel of responsibility for the strip and its teeming population.

But Palestinians said occupation would not truly be over until Israel gave up control of Gaza’s air space, sea lanes and border crossings.

Israel’s counter-argument is that restrictions are still needed because of Gaza’s role as a stronghold of Islamic militants sworn to destroy the Jewish state and behind a campaign of suicide bombings during a 5-year-old uprising.

Gazans say while they will now be able to travel unimpeded within the strip they will still be living in a giant prison, and armed groups insist that without total freedom of movement their commitment to an 8-month-old truce is not guaranteed.

“Israel will retain effective control over the Gaza Strip and will therefore remain the occupying power,” the Palestine Liberation Organisation says in a position paper.

At the core of the debate are two legal standards.

The first is the 1907 Hague Regulations, which says a territory “is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army”.

Then there is the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which lays out the occupier’s responsibilities for providing basic services to citizens of the occupied territory, allowing free access to relief agencies and not moving its citizens there.

Israel has long maintained that the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured in the 1967 Middle East war, have not been under occupation but simply held “in dispute”.

The Palestinian areas, it points out, never constituted an actual state and Jordanian rule of the West Bank and Egyptian control of Gaza, which lasted 19 years starting with the 1948 war over Israel’s creation, was never legally recognised.—Reuters