A United Nations human rights expert has slammed Israel’s ‘apartheid practices’ in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying the Tel Aviv regime’s actions against Palestinians amount to ‘persecution’.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, made the remarks in a report released on Tuesday, which details Israeli efforts to stamp out the Palestinian collective identity and sovereignty.
‘Realising the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination requires dismantling once and for all the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and its apartheid practices,’ she said.
Albanese also documented the use of lethal force against journalists and humanitarian workers critical of Israel, as she pointed to the recent detention order against French-Palestinian human rights defender Salah Hammouri, who has been held in Israeli jails under the policy of so-called administrative detention since March.
According to the report, almost 4,500 Palestinians are currently detained, 730 under the practice of administrative detention, in which Israel keeps the detainees without charge for up to six months, a period that can be extended an infinite number of times.
Children as young as 12 have been victims of arbitrary arrest and detention, the report said, adding that 500 to 700 minors were arrested by the Israeli regime every year.
Albanese further pointed to the closure of seven Palestinian civil society rights groups’ offices by Israeli forces in the West Bank in August, calling the move an abuse of counter-terrorism legislation.
‘This appears to be an attempt to further shrink, if not outright ban, space for human rights monitoring and legal opposition to the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territory,’ she said, arguing that it was time for a ‘paradigm shift’ in Israel’s relations with the international community.
Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian teenager and injured three others in separate military raids in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, a tense day marked by violence and siege.
The UN special rapporteur also criticised efforts by some regional states to normalise ties with Israel, calling the peacemaking attempts ‘ineffective’ due to the fact that ‘they have not focused their approaches on human rights, particularly the right to self-determination, and have overlooked the settler-colonial underpinnings of the Israeli occupation’.
She also called on the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to release an updated database of businesses involved in Israeli settlements.
Albanese further urged all countries to demand an immediate end to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and a return of all land and resources from and of which the Palestinian people have been displaced and dispossessed, independent of any negotiations between Israel and Palestine to settle the conflict.
- The recent shooting operations by Palestinian resistance groups and the ramped-up struggle against the Tel Aviv regime in the West Bank have proved how fragile the Israeli military is, a Palestinian media report says.
‘Shooting operations and the targeting of Zionist troopers at military checkpoints and positions in the West Bank have been ramped up recently, with Israeli forces getting wounded and killed by Palestinian fighters,’ the report said, according to Tasnim news agency.
The report was pointing to two recent shooting operations carried out within less than 48 hours in two separate neighbourhoods in al-Quds (Jerusalem).
On October 9, an Israeli soldier was killed while two others were injured in a shooting attack at the Shuafat refugee camp checkpoint in East al-Quds.
Two days later, a second shooting operation targeted and killed another Israeli soldier near the Shavei Shomron settlement in Nablus.
The report said while the two operations have been carried out at different times in two different areas, they both were a success.
‘Carrying out similar operations in the future can rob the Israeli military of its dignity within the Zionist community, create growing distrust and bring discredit on it,’ it added.
It concluded that the reduced efficiency of the Israeli military can create distrust among the troopers and commanders, lead to the withdrawal of the ground forces, and make the military reliant on its air forces in the conflicts.
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.
The Palestinian health ministry says at least 171 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the illegally occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip since the beginning of the year, including 51 Palestinians during Israel’s three-day assault on Gaza in August.
A Palestinian resistance group has urged Palestinians across the West Bank to directly confront Israeli forces and settlers.
Nablus siege shows failure of Israeli security apparatus
Hazem Qassem, a spokesman for the Gaza-based Hamas resistance movement, said that the ongoing siege in the Shuafat refugee camp in Nablus, which came into force following the October 9th shooting operation, reveals the failure of the Israeli security apparatus.
‘The continuation of the closure, siege and collective punishment policy imposed by the occupation on the city of Nablus, for the sixth consecutive day, is nothing but an expression of the impotence and failure experienced by the security system of the occupation, in the face of the rising resistance and uprising of our people throughout the occupied West Bank,’ Qassem said in a statement on Monday.
‘We are mobilised by our people and our heroic resistance fighters in Nablus, Jenin, Shuafat and the entire West Bank, and they are writing the most wonderful epics and heroism in the face of an arrogant occupation that knows nothing but the language of force,’ he said.
He added that the siege, incursions and murders will neither ‘intimidate the resistance’ nor will they stop them from protecting their lands and sanctity.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Nablus have been trapped in the Shuafat refugee camp and nearby towns by Israeli forces since October 11th amid an ongoing search for the shooter that killed an Israeli soldier.
Since the beginning of the Israeli blockade, Palestinians have been unable to leave to receive necessary health treatments, and many basic supplies like flour are running low. Education within the camp has been suspended as well.
