GENEVA (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime is depriving millions of Palestinians of access to a regular supply of clean water while stripping their land of minerals "in an apparent act of pillage”, a United Nations human rights investigator said on Monday.
Michael Lynk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said that the Zionist regime "continues full-steam with settlement expansion” in the West Bank, which the United Nations and many countries deem illegal. There are some 20-25,000 new settlers a year, he said.
He was addressing the UN Human Rights Council, whose debate the Zionist regime's delegation boycotted due to what it considers a deep bias against it. "In his latest farcical report, Mr. Lynk stoops to a new low and (accuses) the Jewish State of stealing,” the regime’s mission in Geneva said in a statement to Reuters. It
accused Lynk of being a "known Palestinian advocate”.
"In Gaza, the collapse of the coastal aquifer, the only natural source of drinking water in the Strip and now almost entirely unfit for human consumption, is contributing to a significant health crisis among the two million Palestinians living there,” the UN official pointed out.
Despite the withdrawal of Israeli settlers and troops from Gaza in 2005, Tel Aviv has maintained a "hermetic seal of air, sea and land blockade” around the coastal enclave, Lynk said.
"For nearly five million Palestinians living under occupation, the degradation of their water supply, the exploitation of their natural resources and the defacing of their environment are symptomatic of the lack of any meaningful control they have over their daily lives,” he noted.
Lynk went on to say that Israeli quarry companies extracted some 17 million tonnes of stone each year, "notwithstanding strict prohibitions in international law against a military power economically exploiting an occupied territory.”
"The Dead Sea and its plentiful natural resources, part of, which lies within the occupied Palestinian territory, is off-limits to any Palestinian development while Israeli companies are permitted to harvest the minerals in an apparent act of pillage,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Ibrahim Khraishi, urged Israel to put an end to "the theft of Palestinian property.”
"Israel must stop this pillaging, what Israel is doing in the occupied territories is very far from its obligations under international law and treaties. This is more even than apartheid,” he said.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said on October 2 last year that some 89 percent of the Gaza Strip population did not have access to safe drinking water.
Gaza has been under the Zionist regime’s siege since June 2007, which has caused a decline in living standards as well as unprecedented unemployment and poverty.
 
In this file picture, Palestinian children fill their bottles with water from a public tap in the Gaza Strip.