UN Urges Zionist Regime to ‘Immediately’ Halt Settlement Expansion

Date: 25 June 2021 - 21:36

News ID: ۹۱۶۶۶

NEW YORK (Dispatches) – The United Nations says the Zionist regime is flagrantly violating international law by expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank and East al-Quds, urging the regime to halt their enlargement immediately.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and UN Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland reported on the implementation of a 2016 Security Council resolution that declared settlements have “no legal validity”. The global body demanded a halt to the settlement expansion, which jeopardizes the possibility of a future Palestinian state.
Wennesland said in a briefing to the council on Guterres’ 12-page report that he was “deeply troubled” by the occupying regime’s approval of a plan to add 540 housing units to the Har Homa settlement in East al-Quds as well as the establishment of settlement outposts. He said that is “illegal also under Israeli law”.
“I again underscore, in no uncertain terms, that Israeli settlements constitute a flagrant violation of United Nations resolutions and international law,” the UN envoy said.
West Bank tensions have reached boiling point as Zionist settlers continue their expropriation of Palestinian land.
In May, 34 Palestinians were killed – the highest monthly figure in 10 years – with the regime’s domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, reporting almost 600 violent incidents, as the occupying regime’s military reinforced its presence in the occupied territory with several more battalions.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in its latest humanitarian report covering the first two weeks of June alone, stated that Zionist settlers injured 11 Palestinians including four children, damaged vehicles, and destroyed hundreds of olive trees, water systems and other Palestinian-owned property.

‘Catalogue of Violations’ Against Palestinians

Meanwhile, Amnesty International says the Zionist regime’s police carry out a “catalogue of violations” against Palestinians across the occupied territories, including unlawful force against peaceful protesters, sweeping mass arrests, and subjecting detainees to torture and other ill-treatment.
The rights group reported on Thursday that regime’s police failed to protect Palestinians from premeditated attacks by Zionist settlers.
“Police have an obligation to protect all people under Israel’s control, whether they are Jewish or Palestinian. Instead, the vast majority arrested in the police crackdown following the outbreak of inter-communal violence were Palestinian,” said Saleh Higazi, Amnesty’s Middle East deputy director.
“This discriminatory crackdown was orchestrated as an act of retaliation and intimidation to crush pro-Palestinian demonstrations and silence those who speak out to condemn the occupying regime’s institutionalized discrimination and systemic oppression of Palestinians.”
Amnesty researchers documented more than 20 cases, verified through 45 videos and other forms of digital media, of Zionist police violence since early May, when protests against the forced eviction of Palestinians from the East al-Quds’s neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah began.