Israel violating halt on settlements - UN
UN/MIDDLE EAST: Israel is not complying with a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding a halt to all settlement activity and instead is continuing to expand settlements, making a two-state solution ‘‘increasingly unattainable’', the UN envoy for the Mideast said yesterday.
Nickolay Mladenov told the council that in the three months since June 20, Israel’s settlement activity ‘‘continued at a high rate, a consistent pattern over the course of this year’'.
He said activity was concentrated primarily in east Jerusalem, where plans were advanced for more than 2300 housing units in July, ‘‘30 per cent more than for the whole of 2016’'.
Mladenov stressed that the UN considers settlement activities illegal under international law.
He was delivering the third report on implementation of a resolution adopted by the council in December condemning Israeli settlements as a ‘‘flagrant violation’' of international law.
The resolution marked a striking rupture with past practice by United States President Barack Obama, who had the US abstain rather than veto the measure, as then president-elect Donald Trump demanded.
Since becoming president, Trump has strongly supported Israel, and Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, has repeatedly denounced the December resolution. Trump says he is working for a settlement of the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mladenov said Israeli officials continued to use ‘‘provocative rhetoric’' in support of settlement expansion. He cited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks on August 28 saying: ‘‘There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel ... we will deepen our roots, build, strengthen and settle.’'
He said continuing settlement expansion was also ‘‘undermining Palestinian belief in the international peace efforts’'. In addition, Israel’s demolition of structures in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, which has displaced hundreds of Palestinians, ‘‘undermines the prospects for peace’'.
‘‘Overall, since the beginning of 2017, 344 structures have been demolished, a third of them in east Jerusalem, displacing over 500 people,’' Mladenov said.
The Palestinians seek the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip – territories Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War – for their future state. The international community, including Trump’s predecessors, has long supported the two-state solution.
But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas issued a warning in his address to the UN last week, saying that with hopes running out for an independent Palestinian state, he might have no choice but to seek a single, bi-national state with Israel.
Mladenov told the security council that ``continued violence against civilians and incitement perpetuate mutual fear and suspicion, while impeding any efforts to bridge the gaps between the two sides’'. – AP