The International Court of Justice ruled that Israel has violated international law by building a 425-mile wall through the West Bank. The U.S. representative is the only judge on the 15-person panel to have backed Israel. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative and President of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committee speaks outside the court:

"...This is a wall that extends for about 752 kilometers, about three times as long, as I said, and twice as high as the Berlin Wall used to be. In many places, it’s a concrete wall, which is nine meters high. In many places, it is a wall that extends for a width of 104 meters, destroying and damaging agricultural areas, uprooting hundreds of thousands of olive trees, as has already happened. It is a wall that transforms at least 78 communities in the West Bank into ghetto-like entities. The best description of that is the City of Qalqilya, which has 46,000 people and which is surrounded by the wall completely from all directions, now leaving only one entry which is a route that is eight meters in width with a gate and the gate has a key and the Israeli soldiers hold the key and they shut off the city every evening at 6:00 p.m. and open it in the morning and sometimes they don't open it in the morning. There are 52 gates in that area. Only 11 of them are functioning. Most of those are open for 15 minutes, three times a day only. So, people are enclaved behind this wall, in something that can only be described as ghetto-like structures. It is destroying the whole humanitarian situation. We are unable to transfer patients from one area to the other. The health system is destroyed. Agriculture is destroyed. The normal economy and trade is destroyed, and many students cannot go to their educational facilities. So, practically it paralyzes and destroys the economy, health, and normal life of people. That's why we lost already 90 people who died because they could not cross the checkpoints or the wall gates to get to medical treatment and that's why as many as 55 Palestinian women had to give birth at checkpoints. One third of them lost their babies. This is not a wall that is built on the borders between the West Bank and Israel as some people might think and then say this is needed for security. No. It is a wall that goes as deep as 25 kilometers, 11 miles or more, inside the West Bank and it is inside the Occupied Territories. They are the territories that are considered by international law as occupied territories that cannot be violated by Israel. It is also a wall that is destroying the whole fabric, the social fabric of Jerusalem. It has already separated 271,000 people from the area of Jerusalem from the city of Jerusalem, preventing them from getting to their hospitals, schools, and economic facilities..."