THE Palestinian Foreign Ministry said yesterday that the fatal shooting of a teenage girl by Israeli military forces during a raid in the northern occupied West Bank city of Jenin was the outcome of the international community’s failure to hold the Tel Aviv regime accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian nation, especially its children.
The Ministry said: ‘The State of Palestine condemns in the strongest terms Israel’s ongoing crimes and deliberate killings of Palestinian minors, including the latest murder of 16-year-old Jana Majdi Zakarneh by a sniper in Jenin while she was on the roof of her house.’
The statement added: ‘Jana is another victim of the international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing and escalating crimes. The occupying regime’s targeting of Palestinian children in their homes, at schools, and on streets is systematic and widespread, and is aimed at intimidating the minors and their families and spreading insecurity within the Palestinian society.
‘Palestine reiterates that the list of shame remains the most powerful tool of accountability and an effective deterrent to guarantee child protection. Therefore, we call on the United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres to immediately blacklist Israeli occupation troops and settler militia forces, and hold Israel fully accountable for its crimes against Palestinian children.
‘Israel’s escape from consequences of its crimes undermines the protection of children worldwide,’ the Palestinian Foreign Ministry pointed out.
‘We call on the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (Karim Ahmad Khan) to urgently and effectively investigate Israel’s killing of Jana and many others, as Palestinian children continue to be targeted by the occupying Israeli regime.
‘We also urge all relevant institutions, international officials and governments to openly reject and confront such crimes. Palestinian children are entitled to basic human rights, namely protection, health, dignity and peace. They are not an exception to these universal rules,’ the ministry highlighted.
On Monday, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh called on the United Nations to place the Israeli regime on its secretary-general’s annual ‘list of shame’ for violations against children, after Israeli troops fatally shot Zakarneh in Jenin.
Israeli forces have recently been conducting overnight raids and killings in the northern occupied West Bank, mainly in the cities of Jenin and Nablus, where new groups of Palestinian resistance fighters have been formed.
Since the start of 2022, Israeli troops have killed more than 210 Palestinians, including more than 50 children, in the occupied West Bank and East al-Quds as well as the besieged Gaza Strip. According to the United Nations, the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank this year is the highest in 16 years.
Meanwhile a far right Israeli lawmaker has pledged that the regime will make many Palestinian mothers cry over the dead bodies of their children.
Zvika Fogel, a retired general, opined in an interview with Israel’s Channel 4 last Friday that Israel is ‘too merciful’ in dealing with the Palestinians. . . So I will tell you something that is very unpleasant to say. If the choice is one Israeli mother crying, or a thousand Palestinian mothers crying, then a thousand Palestinian mothers will cry.’
Earlier, on December 3, extremist member of the Knesset (parliament) Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party told an Israeli soldier caught on widely-shared video fatally shooting an unarmed Palestinian that his ‘swift and rigorous’ actions were ‘honourable.’
The British trade unions must now speak up and act against the slaughter of Palestinian children by Zionist fanatics in occupied Palestine. The trade unions must immediately impose a trade boycott of Israel and refuse to allow armaments that are used for killing Palestinians to be transported to Israel.
More than a year ago, leading UK trade unionists said that they would campaign for a general strike in the UK against the slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children by the Zionist regime.
In the same way that the UK trade unions supported arming the South African workers at the time of the Apartheid regime, the TUC must now support arms for Palestine, so that the Palestinian masses have the capacity and the means to defend themselves.
Forward to the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, and with all Palestinians having the right to return to the land that was stolen from them after the signing of the Balfour Declaration, which handed over Palestine to the Zionists.
Now is the time for the British trade unions to pay their debt to Palestine by giving every support to the Palestinian masses to take back their state with Jerusalem as its capital and with all Palestinians having the right to return.