S/PV.5827
5827th meeting
Wednesday, 30 January 2008, 10 a.m.
New York
The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.
The President (spoke in Arabic): I shall now make a statement in my capacity as representative of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
At the outset, I wish to thank Mr. Lynn Pascoe for his briefing to the Council on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.
This year, 2008, marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Palestinian tragedy, and the beginning of this year marked the passing of the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I wish to remind the Council of those two facts because I believe that they are of great importance. Do other members not see, as I do, that the Palestinians have long endured tragedy and suffering, and that they have every right to stop being patient?
I believe that the following explains many of the actions taken against the Palestinian people. Since 1967, the Zionist occupation authorities have attempted to create a new fait accompli by changing the legal status of Jerusalem and by building settlements — all of which are illegal — on the occupied Palestinian territory. For years, those authorities have continued to entrench that reality by building a racist wall that has isolated large portions of the occupied Palestinian territory, reducing its size to less than 12 per cent of the historical Palestinian lands, or nearly 50 per cent of the total area occupied in 1967. These actions have been taken despite the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, which stipulates that the building of the separation wall is illegal and contrary to international law and that the Israelis must dismantle it and compensate the Palestinians who have been harmed by the building of the wall. However, the Israelis have, as usual, continued to flout international legitimacy and legality.
Examples are found in the Zionist escalation of terrorism carried out by the occupation authorities against the Palestinian people, which is shown in the ceaseless campaign of assassination against the Palestinians, as well as in the killings — to which Mr. Pascoe referred — in the past few days in the occupied Gaza Strip. Unfortunately, the constant closures and the siege, as members are aware, is just one link in a long chain of actions, as is the detention of more than 11,000 people, most of them in Israeli prisons and detention centres, as Mr. Mansour pointed out in his statement this morning. Among them are hundreds of women and hundreds of children and over 900 Palestinian officials, including members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
There have also been numerous incursions into Palestinian towns. Those incursions have terrified civilians, whose property has been confiscated and farmland bulldozed. They have also included the setting up of blockades and hundreds of checkpoints in a very small area of land, so as to hinder the mobility of the Palestinian people and make their lives unbearable.
As the Council is aware, and as members can daily observe, the ongoing suffocating siege imposed against the Gaza Strip has had a devastating impact on all aspects of the lives of more than 1.5 million Palestinians. We welcome the announced declaration of intention — which has thus far produced nothing, while all the suffering of the Palestinian people is ignored, suffering which is in violation of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. The Gaza Strip is still under occupation. That constitutes collective punishment of the Palestinian people, which is a crime under international humanitarian law.
Paragraph 2 of the resolution adopted by the Human Rights Council at its sixth special session on 23 January 2008, calls for
“urgent international action to put an immediate end to the grave violations committed by the occupying Power, Israel, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including the series of incessant and repeated Israeli military attacks and incursions therein and the siege of the occupied Gaza Strip”. (A/HRC/S-6/L.1)
The entire world has once again witnessed — if indeed it needed another example — the reality of Israel’s intentions with regard to peace. Following the Annapolis Conference, as is their custom, the Israelis continued to escalate their campaign of wide-scale attacks, not just against Gaza but also against West Bank towns. Mr. Pascoe referred to that and provided us examples. Those attacks have resulted in many victims, including older persons, women and children.
As the occupying Power itself has announced, and as the Council is aware, it is also planning to continue to build settlements. All of that was in the wake of the Annapolis Conference, in contravention of General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, Quartet decisions and even Israel’s own pledges at the Conference.
I would like to warn the Council of the consequences of those actions for peace. The fact that the Israeli occupying authorities continue to flout resolutions pertaining to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, including those of UNESCO, is actually imperilling the Mosque itself.
Israel’s goal is well known, namely, to undermine the very concept of peace. That is its usual behaviour.
Peace will come about only through full and unconditional Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories occupied since 1967 — including East Jerusalem, the occupied Syrian Golan and the Shaba’a farmlands — in accordance with the relevant resolutions of the General Assembly and Security Council and the Arab Peace Initiative, and through the establishment of an independent Palestinian State on all Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, with fixed and recognized borders and with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as its capital. Peace must also include the return of refugees to their homeland, from which they were expelled in 1948 through a wide-scale ethnic cleansing operation that many Israeli historians acknowledge.
In that regard, we would like to underscore the right of the Palestinian people to resist occupation. Describing their resistance as a form of terrorism is an attempt to obliterate that right. That right must be supported, not undermined.
I should like to remind the Council that the Palestinians previously decided to halt the launching of rockets. Those rockets have been referred to often in the Council, although they have never actually killed or injured anyone. Palestinians pledged to halt those launchings many months ago. During that time, Israel has continued with its usual behaviour: killings, extra-judicial executions, incursions and so on.
The United Nations, through the Security Council — the organ entrusted with the maintenance of international peace and security — should shoulder its responsibility vis-à-vis bringing peace to Middle East and find ways to implement Council resolutions 242 (1967), 338 (1973) and 1397 (2002). The Council cannot fulfil its role unless it respects its own resolutions and works to implement them.
The situation in Lebanon continues to experience the effects of Israel’s aggression that began on 12 July 2006. The Council did not attempt to halt that aggression at the appropriate time. That failure led to the general destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure. That has been underscored by numerous United Nations reports, and there is no need for me to cite document numbers. Lebanon continues to suffer from that aggression, in particular as a result of mines planted by the enemy and the cluster bombs it utilized. In continuing to refuse to provide maps to the location of those mines and cluster bombs, Israel is deliberately exposing civilians to the ongoing possibility of being killed by them and is paralyzing economic development and humanitarian efforts in many parts of Lebanon.
I should like to remind the Council of the daily letters from the representative of Lebanon with regard to Israel’s ongoing violations of its terrestrial, maritime and air space. Such violations explicitly contravene resolution 1701 (2006), and I believe they are contributing to what is taking place in Lebanon today.
I now resume my functions as President of the Security Council.
I give the floor to the representative of Lebanon.
