A senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) executive committee has called on the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, to blacklist Israel as the result of the annual UN report on children who live in armed conflict.
Hanan Ashrawi’s statements were made in response to the fact that the UN failed to blacklist Israel for the fourth consecutive year.
“UN’s failure to blacklist Israel despite the pressure exerted by many prominent human rights organizations and experts, including the UN Special Rapporteurs, proves the international system's failure to hold criminals accountable and confirms the international cover always granted to the occupying power,” Ashrawi said.
She pointed to Israel’s long documented record of human rights violations against Palestinian children, including the arbitrary detention of hundreds of children, its use of torture and other grave violations, including the deliberate killing and maiming of roughly 2,800 Palestinian children in 2018 alone.
“Turning a blind eye to Israeli crimes and failing to apply such nominal standards of accountability encourages the occupying power to escalate its flagrant violations against our people, including children, and boosts its impunity,” she added.
Ashrawi stressed that the extremist right-wing in Israel is exploiting the current US-Israeli partnership to create new facts on ground with absolute disregard for international law and declared rejection of the internationally-endorsed requirements of peace, including Palestinian statehood.
This was clearly evident in the Israeli Cabinet’s farcical “approval” of Palestinian homes in so-called Area C in the occupied West Bank as a way to whitewash the construction of 6,000 new illegal settlement units on stolen Palestinian land.
In this regard, she said: “We reaffirm that all settlement construction in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, is illegal and constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute. Israeli intransigence and American collusion cannot change this legal fact or set it aside.”
The Palestinian official also called upon the international community and its institutions to uphold the principles, laws, and humanitarian values it has established, to hold Israel accountable for its crimes and to protect the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.
She said these rights should be given to them based on laws and resolutions of international legitimacy, stressing on them to confront the concepts of populism, racism, extremism, and individualism led by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Peace and prosperity in the region will remain elusive so long as racist and colonial agendas that dismiss Palestinian rights are perpetuated by international inaction on the one hand and US collusion on the other hand,” Ashrawi noted.
