آفاق وتحديات تطبيق قانون المياه الفلسطيني الجديد

The main purpose of endorsing laws and legislations in general is to preserve the rights and powers of their endorsers and users. This requires considerable institutional and social efforts to achieve the objectives, for which the laws were laid. This thesis studies the implementation of the new Palestinian Water Law 2014, which covers water sector reform regulations and procedures, specifies mandates of stakeholders and institutions, regulates relation between the stakeholders active in the water sector. The main objective of this study is to assess the implementation of the new Palestinian water law issued by presidential decree (June, 2014), which was endorsed in 2014 by a decision of the Cabinet of Ministers. The Palestinian Water Authority played the main role in preparing the law in consultation with other stakeholders including the Ministry of Agriculture, Environmental Quality Authority ... etc. The study dealt with two main aspects related to the law. The first aspect deals with the prospects of implementing the law. The second is the challenges that might be faced during the implementation of the law. In view of two sides, it is necessary to build an organizational framework that includes all governmental, nongovernmental and semi-governmental institutions based on the functions of each institution as determined by law. Despite the difficulties faced during the accomplishment of the thesis, due to lack of information and cooperation from a number of the questioned and targeted institutions, the study was based mainly on information collected from stakeholders in the water sector, questionnaires, data from workshops were conducted during the period and before drafting of the law and the interviews as well as from individuals with a view of the past, present and future of the water sector. All information was then analyzed to obtain better overview for water sector in Palestine. The water sector in Palestine suffers from a clear and explicit 2 fragmentation at all levels conflict and contradiction of stakeholder responsibilities, including un-fair allocations of the quantities of water available to the population, uncontrolled withdrawals from the sources as well as the Israeli restrictions and the control of the water sources. As a special view in the water sector, it is necessary to adopt bylaws and resolutions that define the framework of this sector, and clarify the functions, powers and responsibilities of each stakeholder and the participant in the work of the water sector either direct or indirect. In 2014, the new water law was adopted based on an international assessment of the water sector led by the World Bank, the law preparation and the overall reform process was a participatory approach based on all concerned parties involved in the water sector. However, this law may face many difficulties and challenges in the implementation, because of the reluctance of some parties to share the powers and responsibilities, and to the limited capacities of some stakeholders, for example municipalities. The West Bank Water Department (WBWD) supplies water in bulk to the population through the municipalities and other service providers. Regardless of the water law, and due to limited understandings, and fear of changes, some service providers, mainly local authorities are still loyal and under the Local Authorities Law from Ministry of Local Government! There is also a conflict between the work of the Ministry of Agriculture - which has the largest share of the water amount for irrigation and the Water Authority especially in reuse of treated wastewater and the amount of extraction from agricultural wells, as the quantities of extraction from wells exceeded the specified amount. And the licenses are not respected, which will be clarified later. There is also overlap in the powers between the Water Authority and the Environmental Quality Authority on the overall management of wastewater and specifications and standard. Also, there is a conflict between the parties will be addressed in the analysis section of this thesis. 3 Recently, the Palestinian Water Authority was given by the new water law the powers to draft regulations and bylaws. In this period, the PWA faced a real problem because it is not a ministry. The absence of the water authority from the cabinet weekly meeting is in addition causing a big gap between the Water Authority and other ministries. It is believed that if PWA will have a representative in weekly meeting, will increase PWA ability to defend its position and to present them to other ministries. From this perspective, the importance of the study would be obvious, and would highlight the challenges that may face the implementation and why in some cases, it was not yet applied. The last section of this thesis includes suggestions and recommendations to overcome all obstacles, which were explained in the analysis and overlapping power between all relevant authorities

An efficient binary salp swarm algorithm with crossover scheme for feature selection problems

Searching for the (near) optimal subset of features is a challenging problem in the process of Feature Selection (FS). In the literature, Swarm Intelligence (SI) algorithms show superior performance in solving this problem. This motivated our attempts to test the performance of the newly proposed Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) in this area. As such, two new wrapper FS approaches that use SSA as the search strategy are proposed. In the first approach, eight transfer functions are employed to convert the continuous version of SSA to binary. In the second approach, the crossover operator is used in addition to the transfer functions to replace the average operator and enhance the exploratory behavior of the algorithm. The proposed approaches are benchmarked on 22 well-known UCI datasets and the results are compared with 5 FS methods: Binary Grey Wolf Optimizer (BGWO), Binary Gravitational Search Algorithms (BGSA), Binary Bat Algorithm (BBA), Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO), and Genetic Algorithm (GA). The paper also considers an extensive study of the parameter setting for the proposed technique. From the results, it is observed that the proposed approach significantly outperforms others on around 90% of the datasets

Jerusalem properties and endowments : a study of the old city estates in the twentieth century

This book examines the features of urban space in the old city in Jerusalem and its social and historical significance through analyzing types of ownerships including family and charitable waqfs. The book provides charts, diagrams and illustrative maps that indicate types and ratios of property ownerships and their approximate sizes, along with descriptions of real estate properties and methods of their usage. Extracted from initial research data and archival sources and urban architectural surveys, the book’s info is of great benefit to all researchers specializing in Jerusalem’s history and in Levant cities in general. The study presents the results of the project for documenting property ownership in the old town in Jerusalem, as accomplished by Taawon’s Old City of Jerusalem Revitalization Program (OCJRP), in collaboration with a professional team from the department of maps in Arab Studies Society in Jerusalem. This was guided by a dedicated effort to outline the historical context of various ownership systems in Palestine, aiming at reaching a better historical understanding of the sources of the study and at contributing to understanding the transformations and policies of urban landscape in Palestine. يتناول هذا الكتاب ملامح الحيز الحضري في البلدة القديمة بالقدس وأهميتها الاجتماعية والتاريخية من خلال تحليل أنواع الملكيات بما فيها الأوقاف العائلية والخيرية. يوفر الكتاب رسومًا بيانية وخرائط توضيحية تشير إلى أنواع ونسب ملكيات الملكية وأحجامها التقريبية ، إلى جانب وصف العقارات وطرق استخدامها. مستخلصة من بيانات البحث الأولية والمصادر الأرشيفية والمسوحات المعمارية الحضرية ، تعتبر معلومات الكتاب ذات فائدة كبيرة لجميع الباحثين المتخصصين في تاريخ القدس وفي مدن بلاد الشام بشكل عام. تعرض الدراسة نتائج مشروع توثيق ملكية الممتلكات في البلدة القديمة في القدس ، كما تم إنجازه من خلال برنامج إعادة تنشيط مدينة القدس القديمة (OCJRP) بالتعاون مع فريق فني من قسم الخرائط في جمعية الدراسات العربية في القدس. . وقد واسترشد ذلك بجهد مخصص لتوضيح السياق التاريخي لمختلف أنظمة الملكية في فلسطين ، بهدف الوصول إلى فهم تاريخي أفضل لمصادر الدراسة والمساهمة في فهم التحولات وسياسات المشهد الحضري في فلسطي

Potential of biogas production from biomass and organic waste materials in the West Bank of Palestine

This book reviews different ways of energy generation from different resources like agricultural waste, municipal solid waste, and municipal sewage sludge, by producing biogas through anaerobic digestion system and converting it to heat or electricity, or even into cool energy. The potential energy recovered from all these resources decreases the energy price and keeps the environment save from pollution, diseases, etc. The potential electricity generation from the anaerobically digestion of organic solid waste in Palestine is around 325 MWh/day which is enough to cover at least 15000 households. Also the potential energy recovery from cow and chicken manure is around 110542 MWh annually. Applying such a project in Palestine needs between 12-15 years to recover its capital costs. Such a project will save environment, create new jobs for engineers and other skilled labours, and encourage the industries to expand & large their investments.This book reviews different ways of energy generation from different resources like agricultural waste, municipal solid waste, and municipal sewage sludge, by producing biogas through anaerobic digestion system and converting it to heat or electricity, or even into cool energy. The potential energy recovered from all these resources decreases the energy price and keeps the environment save from pollution, diseases, etc. The potential electricity generation from the anaerobically digestion of organic solid waste in Palestine is around 325 MWh/day which is enough to cover at least 15000 households. Also the potential energy recovery from cow and chicken manure is around 110542 MWh annually. Applying such a project in Palestine needs between 12-15 years to recover its capital costs. Such a project will save environment, create new jobs for engineers and other skilled labours, and encourage the industries to expand & large their investments

Investigation of the Chemical Content of Two Specific Streams in Municipal Waste: The Case of Hazardous Household Waste and Dental Waste.

A variety of chemicals is included in the household hazardous waste and the dental waste fractions that are sadly both parts of municipal solid waste in Greece. These chemical compounds have hazardous properties according to international and European regulations. In Greece, the categorization of household hazardous waste is not indicated by any legislation, whereas for dental waste the legislation is existent since May 2012, but the development of a management plan undertaken by the Hellenic Dental Association is not yet active. Given that both waste fractions are managed with other municipal solid wastes, they are spotted in solid waste management facilities causing multiple impacts and challenging the labors’ health and safety status. Desk research involving literature and commercial research was conducted in order for the hazardous substances of each of the aforementioned waste stream to be pinpointed; collected data were compiled into databases for those two specific waste streams and were categorized based on their hazardous properties and the waste facility they are most likely to be found in. Parallel field researches were conducted to: (i) determine the uncertainty level of the fractions, composition, and health/environmental impacts, and (ii) specific parameters were introduced to determine their impact due to the status of health and safety conditions within the management facilities in Greece. Despite the fact that HHW is almost 10% of the total MSW, it was found that 4.00% of their compounds involve a toxic risk and 7.16% of them involve combination risks for humans working in treatment facilities; ten chemical compounds, which are included in this fraction, are categorized as R39/23/24/25 (toxic). On the other hand, in DW, 8.82% of the included chemical compounds involve a toxic risk and 11.76% of them involve combination risks for humans. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of those waste fractions presented in this paper will pave the way toward organization of both waste streams’ management plan followed by compiled strategies and recommendations to divert them from the municipal waste stream and lead them to safe and sustainable management paths

Octupole deformation in neutron-rich actinides and superheavy nuclei and the role of nodal structure of single-particle wavefunctions in extremely deformed structures of light nuclei

Octupole deformed shapes in neutron-rich actinides and superheavy nuclei as well as extremely deformed shapes of the N ~ Z light nuclei have been investigated within the framework of covariant density functional theory. We confirmed the presence of new region of octupole deformation in neutron-rich actinides with the center around Z ~ 96, N ~ 196 but our calculations do not predict octupole deformation in the ground states of superheavy Z> 108 nuclei. As exemplified by the study of 36Ar, the nodal structure of the wavefunction of occupied single-particle orbitals in extremely deformed structures allows to understand the formation of the α-clusters in very light nuclei, the suppression of the α-clusterization with the increase of mass number, the formation of ellipsoidal mean-field type structures and nuclear molecule

غزة : التاريخ الإجتماعي تحت الإستعمار البريطاني، 1917-1948

Gaza: A Social History under British Colonial Rule, 1917–1948. INSTITUTE FOR PALESTINE STUDIES, Beirut – Lebanon, 2018. Ghazzah: al–tārīkh al–ijtimā‘ī taḥta al–isti‘mār al–birīṭānī, 1917–1948, 2018.يقدم هذا الكتاب التاريخ الإجتماعي لمدينة غزة إبان الإستعمار البريطاني حتى نكبة 1948. فيهتم بتقديم قراءة جديدة من منظور سوسيولوجى لم يتم التطرق إليه في دراسة تاريخ مدينة غزة الإجتماعي. فيعرض التركيبة السوسيوإقتصادية و السياسية للمدينة و سكانها و عائلاتها، و يشرح آليات صناعة الوجاهة الإجتماعية، عبر تتبع سوسيوتاريخى. و يتناول عمليات تحديث المدينة أو عصرنتها و العلاقات المعقدة بين سياسات الأهالي من جهة، وسياسات المستعمر البريطاني من جهة أُخرى، وأثر ذلك في عمليات التحضير وإدارة الفراغات والأحياز العامة وشكل العمارة و الخدمات. و يقرأ التغيرات الإقتصادية والإجتماعية المرتبطة بها و التغيرات الحضرية الإجتماعية المرتبطة بخدمات المياه و الإنارة و إقامة منشآت المدينة و مرافقها و وسائل النقل و ميناء المدينة و مطارها و محطة القطارات، و يسعى لتمحيص أشكال التحديث المدينية، و كذلك عرض البني الإقتصادية للمدينة و حرفها و صناعاتها و أسواقها و مواردها و تجارتها. و يغوص الكتاب، إذاً، في تفصيلات الحياة اليومية و التعبيرات الإجتماعية و الثقافية للأهالي و مؤسساتهم و طبيعة العلاقات الإجتماعية و الأنماط الإستهلاكية على نحو غير مألوف، و أيضاً العلاقات بين العائلات و التشكيلات الحضرية بين مدينة غزة و مدن فلسطينية أُخرى