A survey by an Israeli rights group shows that three out of four Palestinian children in al-Quds (East Jerusalem) live below the poverty line.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said on Sunday that the majority of the 300,000 Palestinians, including 95,000 children, in al-Quds live in increasing poverty.

The report also indicates that only one out of 10 Palestinians in the district has access to social services. Almost 160,000 others have no suitable access to the city’s water and sewage network and 50km of main sewage lines are lacking, it added.

The rights group blamed the desperate conditions of Israeli Arabs on Israel’s decades-long policy of systematically neglecting and discriminating against Palestinians.

"Israel’s policy for the past four decades has taken concrete form as discrimination in planning and construction, expropriation of land, and minimal investment in physical infrastructure, government and municipal services," the report said.

"A unified Jerusalem does not exist…The truth is, two cities exist side by side,” said the rights group, challenging Tel Aviv’s claim that it unified Jerusalem after annexing the Arab sector in a move never recognized by the international community.

Israel has seized more than one-third of the Palestinian land in al-Quds, on which it has built more than 50,000 homes for Israeli settlers.

This is while very few Palestinian have managed to get a housing permit over the past decades.

There is also a dire shortage of some 1,000 classrooms. Garbage collection is sporadic at best, and there are no regular postal services.

(Press TV)