UN expert warns Israeli crackdown will fuel more violence, urges international response
GENEVA (QNN) – A UN human rights expert on Friday called on the international community to urgently initiate both short-term and longer-term steps to address the escalating violence in the occupied Palestinian territory and ‘Israel’.
“The past few weeks have seen a rising level of violence associated with Israel’s 55-year-old occupation of Palestine,” said Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.
“International inaction in the face of these new levels of violence will only encourage more of the same,” Lynk added.
“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.
“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,” he indicated.
Lynk pointed out that ‘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.
“A permanent occupation – a legal oxymoron – provides the Palestinians with no political horizon and no hope, only the despair of more of the same,” he added.
