Professor S. Michael Lynk:

I also counted six questions. The first related to the comment of Kofi Annan which I quoted. The Deputy asked how I gather my evidence. What I did not say, and I am sorry if I left any mistaken impression, is that I am not allowed into the occupied Palestinian territory or Israel, nor were two of my immediate predecessors as special rapporteur. It is the policy of Israel to ignore this mandate and not to co-operate. I am not the only UN position holder or body with which Israel does not co-operate. I went to Amman in Jordan once a year, until Covid-19 hit, and received the UN officials and Palestinian and Israeli civil society and human rights activists who would come to meet me there. When Covid hit, my dealings with those organisations were primarily by remote meetings on Zoom.

Plan A, the most desirable situation, would allow me to go to the occupied Palestinian territory to witness what is going on, to see the growth of the settlements and the expropriation of the land, to meet families whose homes have been demolished and to meet families whose members have been imprisoned or put into administrative detention. I do have experience in the occupied Palestinian territory. I worked for a period of time in the late 1980s for the United Nations in Jerusalem on refugee and human rights issues. If I am not allowed into the territories as special rapporteur, then plan B is to rely upon the excellent documentation that comes from civil society and human rights organisations. This is the best documented conflict of the modern world. It is not the best reported but it is the best documented.

Therefore, I have a wealth of information arising from a range of relationships that I have developed, as well as from the quality of our reporting by Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organisations, with respect to that. That is basically how I acquire my evidence with respect to the reports that I deliver. While I wish I had plan A, I think plan B has worked fairly well for the reports that I have written.