COPENHAGEN, October 8 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The Danish security company Group 4 Falck said Tuesday, October 8, it would cease surveillance operations in Jewish settlements in the West Bank in line with U.N. guidelines calling for a halt to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

“We have chosen to drop these activities because we do not want to support a situation that contravenes U.N. recommendations and international law,” company spokesman Niels Pedersen told Agence France-Press (AFP).

The firm, the world’s second largest security services provider, has carried out security work in the occupied Palestinian territories since March when it acquired a 50 percent stake in Hashmira Company, Israel’s largest security group.

The Danish firm’s activity in the Jewish settlements through Hashmira sparked stiff opposition at home among the media, opposition parties and human rights groups.

Pedersen said the firm had asked Hashmira to draw up a plan to dismantle all surveillance activities in the West Bank to be ready for the next board meeting in three weeks’ time.

The company took the decision after taking legal advice and consulting the Danish foreign ministry, Pedersen said.

He added that the company would pull around 100 staff out of the West Bank in a way that would not threaten the settler population it was paid to protect.

The company insisted that it had acted in good faith when it acquired its stake in Hashmira “whose operations in the West Bank represent just one percent of total activity,” Pedersen said.

“These activities are purely defensive and preventive in nature,” he said adding that staff from Group 4 Falck never worked on Israeli police or army surveillance missions but were hired directly by settlers.

The Palestinian intifada, or uprising against Israeli occupation, has lasted over two years and claimed more than 2,500 mostly Palestinian lives.

Petersen said the fact that the company operates in settlements could be interpreted as suggesting Falck did not respect U.N. resolutions.

“We can’t live with that doubt; that’s why we are leaving,” he said.

Falck has operations in 80 countries around the world.

The international community considers all the permanent settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, housing some 200,000 people, to be illegal.

They are one of the main points of contention between the Israelis and the
Hashmira has been asked to present a plan for phasing out all activities in the West Bank at a board meeting on October 28.

About 200 Jewish colonial settlements have been set up in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since Israel seized the territories in the 1967 Middle East war.

All the settlements, according to U.N. resolutions are considered illegal.

Some 60 so-called “rogue” outposts, often just a cluster of caravans, have popped up in recent years.

The settlers believe that they have a biblical right to the land.

According to a report issued Sunday, June 30, by Israeli peace group “Peace Now”, ever since Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came into power in February 2001, Jewish settlers in the West Bank have built 44 new sites.

“Nine of these new sites were erected in the period March-June 2002,” the Peace Now report said. It added that “the term ‘outposts’ is misleading.

“To all intents and purposes these sites are new settlements: they have independent infrastructures and are spread over new pieces of land.”

Peace Now spokesman Tzali Reshef said in a statement that the Israeli government “is systematically violating its commitment to the Israeli public as written in the coalition agreement that formed the basis for the national unity government.”

“The creation of new settlements harms Israel’s security and unnecessarily endangers still more [Israeli] soldiers and citizens,” he said.

For more than thirty years, the creation of Jewish settlements has been a central component of Israel’s effort to consolidate control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.

Israeli settlement construction has served not only to facilitate territorial acquisition and to justify the continuing presence of Israeli armed forces on Palestinian lands, but also to limit the territorial contiguity of areas populated by Palestinians and thereby to preclude the establishment of a viable independent Palestinian state.

Israel’s settlement policy and practices clearly contravene international law. Article 49, paragraph 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that “the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territories it occupies.”

Moreover, the confiscation of land for settlement construction is in violation of the rules contained in the 1907 Hague Regulations protecting public and private property in occupied territory.

Settlement activity is also fundamentally incompatible with the concept of a “just and lasting peace” called for in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242.

In Resolution 465, which was unanimously adopted, the Security Council made clear that “Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants” in the occupied territories not only violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, but also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”