Says Israel’s “racist and colonial” attitude is reminiscent of pre-1948 “crimes” and “killings”
June 22 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Palestinian government has warned this Thursday that Israel “is in a race against time” to annex the entire West Bank and has said that its “racist and colonial” attitude recalls the “crimes” and “massacres” prior to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
“The Israeli government is intentionally raising tensions as part of its race against time to complete the annexation periods of the occupied West Bank,” the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted on its website.
Thus, he has said that these actions have “racist and colonial” overtones and “remember the crimes of Zionist gangs and the culture of setting fires and massacring Palestinians before 1948, which confirms that the Government of Israel is repeating this culture and crimes to complete the occupation and Judaization of historic Palestine”.
Palestinians commemorated on May 15 the 75th Day of the Nakba, an Arabic term meaning “catastrophe” and referring to the flight of some 700,000 people from their homes — to the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and countries in the region– after the creation of the State of Israel.
“The crimes of the occupation, the operations of repression, murder, abuse and constant persecution of our people reveal that the occupation State rejects the option of peace and political solutions to the conflict, in line with the terms of reference of the process of peace and resolutions with international legitimacy,” he said.
In this sense, he has said that the Israeli authorities seek to “force the acceptance of an abhorrent apartheid regime” and has asserted that “international reactions to the crimes of the occupation and the settlers do not correspond to the level of atrocity of these crimes and do not are at the level of the responsibilities that the international community and states have when it comes to applying International Law in occupied Palestine”.
“This weakness and fragility reflects an international double standard that generates complicity with the occupation and its projects hostile to international legitimacy and peace, which leads to its continuation and leads the conflict situation on the ground to levels of violence that are difficult to control by any of the parties”, he stressed.
The statement has been published after the death of a Palestinian in an attack perpetrated by hundreds of Israeli settlers against the West Bank town of Turmus Aya, located in the north of the West Bank, after similar incidents during the last day after the death of four Israelis in a attack carried out in the surroundings of the settlement of Eli.
Hours earlier, the Palestinian government had denounced attacks perpetrated by settlers against several towns and criticized that “settler militias and their armed terrorist elements” are “expanding” their attacks against “unarmed Palestinian civilians.”
Increased tensions in recent months have resulted in the deaths of around 175 Palestinians and 25 Israelis, amid fears of a widespread outbreak of violence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that “all options are open” amid calls within the government coalition for a large-scale operation in the West Bank.
Following that, three Palestinians — members of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and Islamic Jihad — were killed in a drone strike Wednesday night near Jenin, the first such incident in the West Bank since the end of the Second Intifada nearly two decades ago.
