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Palestinian president urges halt of illegal Israeli colonial settlement activities

Xinhua, November 24, 2015 Adjust font size:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Monday that "all illegal Israeli colonial settlement activities must be stopped" and called upon the international community to provide protection for the Palestinian people for as long as this illegal occupation continues.

"Over the past years, I have cautioned of the grave consequences of what is happening in and around Jerusalem, including severe restrictions imposed on our people, violations of their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, and the attempts to change the identity, historical and demographic character of Jerusalem," said Abbas in a statement to mark the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People which falls on Nov. 29.

"All illegal Israeli colonial settlement activities must be stopped," he said. "All illegal Israeli actions and measures aimed at Judaization of East Jerusalem and at altering or eliminating the Palestinian Christian and Muslim presence in and the identity of the Holy City must be halted."

Stressing that peace is the desired goal, Abbas noted that his country continues to give one opportunity after the other to achieve this goal, only to find that these peace chances were wasted.

"Many rounds of negotiations have been wasted by successive Israeli governments, which rendered the negotiations useless just to gain more time in order to build more colonial settlements and its apartheid, annexation wall on our land, to steal our natural resources, and to impose new facts on the ground," he said.

Combined, this has only further entrenched the occupation and undermined the realization of the two-state solution, he added.

Abbas also called into question "the intended meaning of the action of Israel ... to dispatch 600,000 settlers and confiscate the land of the occupied State of Palestine to settle them there, knowing that this action in itself is a war crime according to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and it is totally contradictory to the two-State solution."

Therefore he called upon "the entire international community to provide international protection for the Palestinian people for as long as this illegal occupation continues."

Concluding the statement, he noted that: "The Palestinean people have the right to enjoy freedom, dignity, sovereignty and independence in their Palestinian State with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is imperative for our region to enjoy security, safety and stability."

In 1977, the UN General Assembly called for the annual observance of Nov. 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. On that day, in 1947, the assembly adopted the resolution on the partition of Palestine.

The observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People also encouraged UN member states to continue to give the greatest support and publicity to the observance of the Day of Solidarity. Enditem