Ramallah: The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has come under significant pressure from Israel to suspend its national campaign to boycott colony products.

However, Palestinians are fully determined to go on with their campaign till their markets are totally clean of the colony products, a senior Palestinian said.

Addressing a press conference on Sunday, Dr. Hassan Abu Lebdah, the Palestinian Minister of National Economy, said "the campaign has been achieving its goals where the colony products are missing on the shelves of the Palestinian markets".

Dr Abu Lebdeh denied that there had been rumours that the Palestinian campaign had been up for negotiation. The law outlined that trading in colony products was a crime and such negotiations would be against the law.

"[Any such negotiation] aims at undermining the national effort to fight the colony products and the Palestinian attempts to liberate the Palestinian economy from the illegal control of the Israeli colonies," he said.

He stressed that there was no exception in the Palestinian law which banned colony products from Palestinian markets.

Salah Haniya, who heads the Palestinian Customer Protection Association told Gulf News that the products of the factories in the Atrout Industrial Zone, close to Qalandiya Checkpoint and owned by Palestinians from Occupied Jerusalem were legal products and could circulate the Palestinian markets.

They were not considered Israeli colony products, but the products of factories in the same zone.

"This area of Atrout is handled in a special way in support of the Palestinian residents of [Occupied] Jerusalem, who have businesses in this industrial area that was occupied in 1967," he said.

He added that this controversial issue of the Atrout zone had caused the dissolution of the Hebron branch of the customer protection association.

This association had seized the products from a printing house in Atrout, which was owned by a Palestinian resident of Occupied Jerusalem, where these products were handled as colony products. 

"Three more factories based in Israeli colonies and owned by Palestinians were given a year’s grace period (ends in April 2011) to shift to Palestinian industrial zones in the West Bank," he said.

"The Israeli investors and owners of businesses in the colonies have been negatively affected from an economic perspective with the Palestinian campaign to boycott the colony products," he said.

"The Israelis have been threatening the Palestinians that the Palestinian labourers in the colonies will be affected; the Palestinian products will not have access to the Israeli markets; the Palestinian exports and imports will be complicated and badly hurt," he said.

Haniyah said that colony products were currently being replaced by Palestinian and Arab products and that the Palestinian Authority had announced that the Palestinian territories would be totally free of colony products by the year's end.

"We have prepared a detailed list of colony products including the colonies of Al Jolan so that the Palestinian traders will be totally aware of the colony products," he said.

Israeli colonists have been setting up mobile shopping centres in areas beside their colonies for much cheaper prices to attract the Palestinian shoppers, he said, adding that scores of Palestinians have approached these centres.

He stressed that the vehicles of those shoppers had been registered and warned that purchasing colony products would subject people to heavy penalties.

The Palestinian National Authority said it was working hard to collect all possible information through its sources about the international brand companies and restaurants which opened branches in the colonies, in order to have them shut them down.