2023-10-15 01:41:00
Photo: AFP
The United Nations special rapporteur for Palestinian human rights warned this Saturday about the risk of “mass ethnic cleansing” similar to the Nakba, the flight of some 700,000 people from their homes after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. , and called on the international community to intensify efforts to achieve a ceasefire.
The speaker, Francesca Albanesetargeted in his message both the Islamist resistance movement Hamas “and the Israeli occupation forces,” according to the Europa Press news agency.
Albanese denounced, in particular, “the death of more than 600 Palestinian children” and more than 423,000 displaced people “as a result of Israeli attacks” within a general balance that leaves for now more than 2,200 Palestinians and 1,300 Israelis dead.
In the last hours, a Israel’s ultimatum to the population of northern Gaza caused the departure of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of a region comprising 1.1 million people, half of the enclave’s total population, amid fears of an imminent large-scale ground incursion by the Israeli Army.
For all these reasons, “the current situation in the Palestinian Territories and Israel has reached feverish delirium,” said the rapporteur in a statement in which she recalls that “Israel has already committed mass ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians under the haze of war” and, in 2023, “in the name of self-defense, attempts to justify what would constitute another cleanup.
Photo: AFP
As an independent expert of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Albanese urged the UN and its member states to “intensify efforts to mediate an immediate ceasefire between the parties” before the situation reaches a “point of no return.”
Albanese recalled that the Palestinian population has suffered “five large-scale wars since 2008”, a year after the declaration of the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip that has been “widely condemned by the international community as collective punishment.”
Thus, the UN expert warned of the serious danger that the international community is witnessing a repetition of what the Palestinians call the Nakba of 1948 and the Naksa of 1967 (the so-called “Regression” of the Palestinian population after this year’s Arab-Israeli war) “but on a larger scale.
For all these reasons, “the international community must do everything possible to prevent it from happening again” given that, right now, “any military operation that Israel decides to carry out will be far beyond the limits of international law.”
“The international community must stop these flagrant violations of international law right now, before this tragic history is repeated, because time is money and Palestinians and Israelis deserve to live in peace, with equal rights, dignity and freedom,” he said. Albanian.
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