SYRIA’S permanent representative to the United Nations has denounced Israeli assaults on Syrian territories as a ‘continuing, flagrant violation of the UN Charter, of international law and of all Security Council resolutions’ urging respect for its sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Speaking on Wednesday at a UN Security Council briefing on the situation in the Middle East, Bassam Sabbagh said the repeated Israeli aggressions against Syria consolidate the policies of the occupying entity, which is practising ‘state terrorism’ and supporting terrorist groups.
Syria, he added, has notified the Security Council and UN chief of the details of Israeli airstrikes and the threat they pose to regional security and stability. Sabbagh also said that, in less than a year, the Tel Aviv regime had conducted more than 50 acts of aggression on Syria, killing a large number of civilians and destroying their properties.
Israel mostly keeps quiet about the attacks on Syrian territories, which many view as a knee-jerk reaction to the Syrian government’s increasing success in its counter-terrorism battle.
Elsewhere in his remarks the Syrian ambassador to the UN complained of Israel’s systematic violations against residents of the Golan Heights, and renewed a call on the international community to press its regime to open immediately the Quneitra crossing linking the occupied area to the rest of Syria.
Israel seized Golan from Syria in the closing stages of its 1967 Six-Day War with Arab countries, which also saw the regime occupy the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East al-Quds (Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. Tel Aviv unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 in a move not recognised internationally.
Syria has repeatedly reaffirmed its sovereignty over Golan, saying the territory must be completely restored to its control.
Back in 2019, former US president Donald Trump signed a decree recognising Israeli ‘sovereignty’ over the occupied Golan Heights.
‘The Israeli occupation authorities continue attempts of consolidating occupation of Syrian Golan in an unprecedented challenge to the international will and the relevant resolutions of the UN and Security Council, in particular Resolutions 242, 338 and 497, through escalating settlement (activities) on remains of the Syrian villages and territories destroyed by this occupation, seizing lands of Golan’s citizens and establishing settlement schemes,’ Sabbagh said, citing a plan by the Tel Aviv regime to set up huge wind turbines on an area equal to one fifth of the agricultural farmlands remaining to Golan citizens.
He reiterated Syria’s adherence to the Palestinian people’s cause against the decades-long Israeli occupation. Syria supports the Palestinians’ right to establish a sovereign state on their whole territory, with al-Quds as its capital and the right of refugees to return to their homeland based on UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
Meanwhile an Iranian envoy to the United Nations has censured the UN Security Council’s seven decades of utter silence against all unlawful acts committed by the Israeli regime, saying that the history of mankind testified that when unlawful acts go unpunished, they are repeated.
‘The Council’s decades-long utter and inexcusable inaction has seriously emboldened that regime to commit more crimes with more brutality,’ Zahra Ershadi, the deputy permanent representative of Iran to the UN, said on Wednesday before a UN Security Council session on ‘The Situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian Question.’
She also slammed the US for encouraging Israel by systematically shielding the regime against any action by the Security Council.
‘The latest example of such measures was the act of the United States, in May 2021, in blocking the Security Council from issuing even a simple press statement calling for an end to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza,’ she said.
Ershadi made it clear that such ‘unwavering support’ for Israel by the US is against the inherent rights of the oppressed Palestinians, including their right to life, dignity, liberation, self-defence, self-determination, and to establish their own independent State.
‘The Security Council must put an immediate end to this unjustifiable and unacceptable trend,’ she continued, ‘and compel the Israeli regime to cease, immediately and completely, all its crimes against Palestinians; remove the unlawful and inhumane blockade of the Gaza Strip; end the occupation of all Palestinian territories, the occupied Syrian Golan and parts of Lebanon; and also, to hold that regime accountable for committing the gravest international crimes for over several decades,’ the Iranian envoy added.
She said the Islamic Republic of Iran ‘has condemned the Israeli regime in the strongest terms, and reiterates its support for the just cause of the Palestinian people and the full realisation of all their inalienable rights – particularly their right to self-determination and to establish an independent Palestinian state, with al-Quds as its capital.’
Elsewhere in her remarks, Ershadi said the Israeli regime’s representative once again played victim in his statement on Wednesday, and accused others in the region and the world in order to distract attention from its brutal crimes.
‘Instead of proposing to address the challenges of others, the Israeli regime must stop murder and bloodshed and cease expanding its terrorist activities to the entire region,’ she said, rejecting Israel’s accusations regarding Iran’s peaceful nuclear programme as ‘completely absurd, irrelevant and baseless.’
The accusations, she said, are aimed at covering up the dangers posed by the Israeli regime’s nuclear weapons to the region and beyond.
‘To remove this threat,’ she continued, ‘the international community must compel that regime to renounce the possession of nuclear weapons, join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and put all its nuclear activities and facilities under the comprehensive safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
‘Other accusations of the Israeli regime’s representative were mere fabrication and disinformation too,’ she added.
- The Iranian Parliament’s speaker also accused the United States and Israel of having turned ‘to economic war and sanctions following (their) failure to defeat the resistance front on the battle ground,’ and has stressed ‘the need for enhanced trade ties among countries of the resistance axis to foil the pair’s economic plots.
‘They (the US and Israel) are convinced that they cannot defeat Iran or the (broader) resistance front militarily, and that is why they have resorted to economic war and sanctions,’ was the way Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf put it during a meeting with Syrian Prime Minister Hussein Arnous in Damascus.
Qalibaf referred to the US military’s unlawful presence on Syrian soil, and said such measures ‘will bring them no results. That is the reason why they have stood up against the people using media and economic wars.
‘Today, the resistance front is facing an economic war,’ Qalibaf said. ‘We can defeat the enemy in the economic war as well through joint cooperation in the economic and trade sector.’