Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, today called on the international community to urgently initiate both short-term and longer-term steps to address the Israeli escalation of violence in occupied Palestine.
“The past few weeks have seen a rising level of violence associated with Israel’s 55-year-old occupation of Palestine,” said Lynk in a statement. “International inaction in the face of these new levels of violence will only encourage more of the same.”
In recent weeks, Israeli security forces stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied Jerusalem and arrested hundreds of Palestinian worshipers and injured many others. More than 40 Palestinians and 15 Israeli and foreign nationals have been reportedly killed in the violence so far this year.
“This entrenched Israeli occupation, which has become indistinguishable from practices of apartheid, is based on the institutional discrimination of one racial-national-ethnic group over another,” said the Special Rapporteur.
He added, “Violence and large-scale human rights abuses are inherent in such an unequal relationship. History teaches us the bitter lesson that prolonged and unwanted alien rule is invariably enforced by violence and resisted by violence.”
“Israel has chosen to deepen its occupation through the establishment of 300 settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law, where 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers live with full legal and political citizenship rights amidst five million stateless and rightless Palestinians,” Lynk said.
“A permanent occupation – a legal oxymoron – provides the Palestinians with no political horizon and no hope, only the despair of more of the same.”
Source: Palestine News & Information Agency