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Palestinian Territories (palestinian + territory)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	40%

Selected Abstracts

Impact of wastewater discharge on the channel morphology of ephemeral streams

EARTH SURFACE PROCESSES AND LANDFORMS, Issue 12 2001
Marwan A. Hassan
Abstract The impact of wastewater flow on the channel bed morphology was evaluated in four ephemeral streams in Israel and the Palestinian Territories: Nahal Og, Nahal Kidron, Nahal Qeult and Nahal Hebron. Channel changes before, during and after the halting of wastewater flow were monitored. The wastewater flow causes a shift from a dry ephemeral channel with intermittent floods to a continuous flow pattern similar to that of humid areas. Within a few months, nutrient-rich wastewater flow leads to rapid development of vegetation along channel and bars. The colonization of part of the active channel by vegetation increases flow resistance as well as bank and bed stability, and limits sediment availability from bars and other sediment stores along the channels. In some cases the established vegetation covers the entire channel width and halts the transport of bed material along the channel. During low and medium size flood events, bars remain stable and the vegetation intact. Extreme events destroy the vegetation and activate the bars. The wastewater flow results in the development of new small bars, which are usually destroyed by flood flows. Due to the vegetation establishment, the active channel width decreases by up to 700 per cent. The deposition of fine sediment and organic material changed the sediment texture within the stable bar surface and the whole bed surface texture in Nahal Hebron. The recovery of Nahal Og after the halting of the wastewater flow was relatively fast; within two flood seasons the channel almost returned to pre-wastewater characteristics. The results of the study could be used to indicate what would happen if wastewater flows were introduced along natural desert streams. Also, the results could be used to predict the consequences of vegetation removal as a result of human intervention within the active channel of humid streams. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Consanguinity and reproductive wastage in the Palestinian Territories

PAEDIATRIC & PERINATAL EPIDEMIOLOGY, Issue 2 2009
Shireen Assaf
Summary Many studies have found that consanguinity poses a threat to child mortality and health and can also pose a threat to offspring survival before birth. However, there are conflicting findings with some studies having found no increased risk on offspring survival associated with consanguinity. Data from a population-based survey conducted in 2004 in the Palestinian Territories was used to assess the risk of consanguinity on offspring survival. The analysis was conducted on 4418 women aged 15,49 who were asked whether or not they had experienced a stillbirth or a spontaneous abortion. These two outcomes were combined together for the analysis of reproductive wastage. Multivariable negative binomial regression was conducted to calculate the incidence risk ratios (IRR) for each region in the Palestinian Territories separately. The strongest risk factors for reproductive wastage, after controlling for other variables, were found to be consanguinity, age and parity with age presenting the highest IRRs. Standard of living, locality type, education level, women's employment and past intrauterine device use were not found to be significant risk factors for reproductive wastage. In the West Bank only first cousin level of consanguinity was found to be significant and ,hamola' level (or from same family clan) lost its significance after adjusting for other variables. In the Gaza Strip both the first cousin and ,hamola' levels of consanguinity were significant and presented almost equal IRRs of 1.3. In conclusion, consanguinity was found to be a significant risk factor for reproductive wastage. [source]

GETTING BY THE OCCUPATION: How Violence Became Normal during the Second Palestinian Intifada

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2008
LORI ALLEN
ABSTRACT The second Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation, which began in September 2000, saw Palestinian areas repeatedly invaded and shelled by Israeli forces. A long history of war and targeted cities is told along the thoroughfares of Palestinian towns; memories of past battles and defeats inscribed in street signs recall massacres in places like Tel Al-Za'atar and Deir Yasin. But recent events were more important than any official marker and formed the most relevant base by which Palestinians organized their lives. Commemorative cultural production and basic acts of physically getting around that became central to the spatial and social practices by which reorientation and adaptation to violence occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories. This article analyzes the spaciotemporal, embodied, and symbolic aspects of the experience of violence, and the political significance of cultural practices whereby violence is routinized. Such an approach provides a lens onto the power of violence in Israel's colonial project in the occupied territories that neither necessitates an assumption that violence is all determining of Palestinian experience, nor a championing of every act of Palestinian survival as heroic resistance. Memorialization that occurs in storytelling, in visual culture, in the naming of places and moving through spaces is one way in which this happens. The concept of "getting by" captures the many spatial and commemorative forms by which Palestinians manage everyday survival. The kind of agency that is entailed in practices whereby people manage, get by, adapt, and the social significance of getting used to it may be somewhat nebulous and unobtrusive as it develops in the shadow of spectacular battles and bloodshed. I demonstrate that this routinization of violence in and of itself, the fact of getting by, just existing in an everyday way, is socially and politically significant in Palestine. [source]

Another Nakba: Weapons Availability and the Transformation of the Palestinian National Struggle, 1987,2007

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 2 2010
Francesco Strazzari
Violent clashes of June 2007 saw Hamas ousting Fatah from the Gaza Strip, thereby making patent the existence of a deep politico-military split within the Palestinian national movement. This article sheds light on the present face of the conflict in the Palestinian territories by adopting a historical-analytical perspective that emphasizes the role played by the availability of small arms and light weapons, as one of the many structural factors that underlie the transformation of the Palestinian struggle. Aware of the essentially contestable and reductionist nature of this endeavor, the authors examine the way in which the weapons acquisition process has changed in the time period from the beginning of the first Intifada in 1987 to the Gaza take-over by Hamas, 20 years later. In doing this, they extend the applicability of existing theories about the correspondence between access to weapons and the changing nature of insurgency, so to better understand a complex case where a national struggle has been spiralling into internecine violence and splintering, in what we may call "another Palestinian Nakba." [source]