By NNN-KUNA,
United Nations : Palestine has called on the international community to take “urgent measures” to protect East Jerusalem from Israel’s illegal construction of settlements for there can be no peace without it and that it shall remain the capital of the future Palestinian state.
Palestinian Deputy Ambassador Feda Abdelhady Nasser said in identical letters to the UN secretary-general and the presidents of the Security Council and the General Assembly Wednesday that Israel’s continued construction of settlements, in an attempt to change the character, demographic composition and status of East Jerusalem in order to completely isolate the city from the rest of the Palestinian territory and forcibly annex it, is “totally illegal and not conducive to peace.”
“It is imperative that such gross, constant and grave violations of international law, including humanitarian and human rights law, be firmly and consistently condemned and demands for their cessation be unequivocal. Continued tolerance for such crimes will only further undermine the rule of law in our international system to the detriment of all, which must be avoided,”‘ she stressed.
The issue of Jerusalem, she argued, remains a “core final status issues that must be justly resolved in order to achieve a peaceful settlement. In the interest of peace and justice, the international community must therefore exert urgent measures to protect East Jerusalem and halt all illegal Israeli measures and policies aimed at unilaterally determining the fate of the city, for there can be no peace without East Jerusalem as it is the capital and heart of the future Palestinian state.”
The international community, she stressed, “must call upon Israel, the occupying power, to cease all settlement activities and to abide by all of its legal obligations,” including respect for relevant Security Council resolutions, including resolution 465 of 1980, which called upon Israel to cease all settlement construction and to dismantle those settlements already built.
Israeli Housing Minister Ze’ev Boim announced three days ago over 880 new tenders in two illegal settlements including that constructed on Jabal Abu Ghneim in occupied East Jerusalem.
Overall, since the Annapolis Conference seven months ago, despite its pledges and commitments to cease settlement activity, the Israeli government has actually issued tenders for approximately 17,000 new housing units in illegal Israeli settlements across the occupied West Bank, including in occupied East Jerusalem.
She stopped short of threatening to take the issue before the General Assembly, recalling merely that the Security Council’s failure to address the settlement construction at Jabal Abu Ghneim in 1997, “despite its extremely negative impact on the peace process and the situation on the ground,” led to the General Assembly’s convening of its 10th emergency special session.
The expansion of this settlement at Jabal Abu Ghneim or of any other Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, she said, “must thus be firmly opposed by the international community, as it represents a clear affront to the will of the community, which, in upholding international law, has consistently rejected these illegal settlements from the very first brick.”
Israel’s colonisation campaign in its entirety — the settlements, the Wall, the bypass roads and all other measures intended to facilitate this campaign — “constitutes a grave breach of international law, i.e. war crimes,” she noted.
Such illegal actions, she added, are destroying the territorial contiguity, integrity and unity of the Palestinian territory, destroying the natural environment and destroying the chances for peace as they poison the atmosphere between the two sides, heighten tension and frustration, destabilize the situation on the ground and obstruct progress in the peace process.
She finally called on Israel to take “immediate and tangible” confidence-building measures to indicate its actual willingness to address this issue towards the ultimate achievement of a peaceful two-state solution on the basis of the pre-1967 borders.