Palestine FM: 'International community’s failure to assume responsibility deepens apartheid system’

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that that the international community has failed in its responsibilities towards the Palestinian people has instead become a cover for deepening the apartheid regime in Palestine. In so doing it has empowered the occupation authorities’ plan to undermine the chances of establishing a sovereign Palestinian state following the 1967 borders with occupied East Jerusalem as its capital.

In response to Israeli deputy chairman of the Knesset and member of the ruling Likud Party, Yuli Edelstein, who asked his colleagues to think outside the box, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that “the officials of the ruling right-wing party in Israel continue to disregard the principle of the two-state solution, under the pretext that such solution became obsolete and will not fit the current political reality. They consider that the statements calling for peace by the two-state solution are invalid.”

The statement indicated that the occupation authorities continue to undermine any opportunity to achieve peace through boosting settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories, increasing the number of settlers in the occupied West Bank to nearly one million. On the other hand, Israel is tightening its grip over the occupied Area C, which constitutes more than 60 per cent of the West Bank. This area is controlled, at security and administrative levels, by the occupation authorities under the Oslo Accords, depriving Palestinian citizens of exploiting their lands.

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The Palestinian Foreign Ministry stressed that the Israeli authorities continued their policy of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement against Palestinians, in addition to the Judaisation process undertaken by Israel in occupied East Jerusalem and its surroundings, separating it from its natural Palestinian extension from all sides. The occupation state exploits and controls Palestine’s natural and underground resources, in addition to trespassing all the occupied territories.

The ministry reiterated its strongly-worded denouncement of the Israeli policies and its continuous crimes against the Palestinians, accusing the international community of ignoring those violations that threaten peace and security at a global scale.

The statement also criticised the failure of the international community and the United Nations to enforce hundreds of international resolutions on the situation in Palestine and not to hold Israel accountable for its crimes and violations.