RAMALLAH _ Palestine News Network
PLO executive committee secretary Saeb Erekat on Wednesday called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open an official inquiry into Israeli settlement in the Palestinian territories.
"The International Criminal Court must open an official inquiry into Israeli settlement and occupation in the Palestinian territories," Erekat told the official radio (voice of Palestine).
The year 2018 saw "a breakdown in moral and human values as the Israeli occupation and settlement continued," Erekat said.
He said the Palestinian leadership will continue to use its right in the UN Security Council and other international organizations to confront Israeli settlement and efforts to implement the UN Human Rights Council resolution to disclose the names of companies dealing with settlement.
The Palestinian Authority handed over to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Fatou Bensouda on May 22 the request to refer to the situation in Palestine over the Israeli "crimes" in the Palestinian territories in a move that is the first of its kind.
For its part, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and expatriates in the Palestinian Authority said that "The international community´s silence on the continued settlement of settlements and the failure to implement the resolutions of international legitimacy on settlement, in the forefront of which is resolution 2334 (promulgated in December 2016), and the lack of accountability of Israel " is an complicity, if not It was a crime in itself ".
In a press statement, the Ministry condemned the Israeli authorities ´ bulldozing of more than 15 dunums of farmland in the south of Hebron, uprooting dozens of olive trees, razing nearly 120 dunums of land in the village of Noon al-Maleh, isolated behind the separation wall southwest of Jenin, and destroying a temple street inside it in favor of expanding Settlement "Shsure ".
It also condemned the "unprecedented settlement operations taking place in the occupied Jordan Valley, in a public lawlessness of the Palestinian territories, aimed at building a large settlement belt along the Palestinian border, by building more than 12 settlements and outposts in a manner that is accompanied by the widest A process of ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Bedouin communities ".
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry stressed that "the absolute American bias of the occupation and the adoption by Washington of its expansionist colonialist settlement policies have encouraged the ruling right in Israel to carry on with its own projects of ventilation in the land of Palestine."
The settlement dossier is the most salient aspect of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and one of the main reasons for the end of the last peace negotiations between the two sides before mid-2014.
