Finland’s Foreign Ministry has stated that the escalation of Israeli military offensives in Jenin is exacerbating an already fragile situation.
“The expansion of settlements as well as the alarmingly increased settler violence and forced evictions of Palestinians are against international law and run counter to international efforts to de-escalate the situation,” it told a news agency.
“We are concerned by the increased violence in West Bank and are monitoring the situation closely. We urge all parties to de-escalate the situation and refrain from provocative actions and statements.”
Finland’s Foreign Ministry
Meanwhile, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said that Israel’s claim that its raids in the occupied West Bank are justified under the law of self-defence “has no validity.”
In a post on X, she said that 20 years ago, the International Court of Justice determined that Israel “could not invoke self-defence under article 51 of the UN Charter to justify its Wall in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt).”
“This past July, the Court indicated that Israel’s very presence in the oPt is itself unlawful”
“Israel’s perversion of the law on self-defence must be recognized for what it is: a brazen attempt to provide an imprimatur of ‘legality’ to the maintenance of its unlawful aggression against the territorial integrity and political independence of the State of Palestine.”
Francesca Albanese
Saleh Hijazi, apartheid-free policy coordinator for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, also noted that Israel is a “settler colony” that is intent on “replacing Indigenous Palestinians with the colonial settlers.”
“It does so through genocide like in Gaza, … through ethnic cleansing like we’re seeing right now in the north, west, and middle of the occupied West Bank, and through apartheid against all of the Palestinian people.”
Saleh Hijazi
He called on the international community to boycott Israel for its 76 years of “criminal activity, the systematic killing, systematic torture, and systematic destruction of poverty and livelihood.”
Israel’s Pause For Vaccinations Deemed “A Sick Joke”
Rather than allow temporary pauses for polio vaccinations, Dr Tamer Qarmout, an associate professor in public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, said that Israel’s war on Gaza needs to end.
Speaking to a news agency, Qarmout pointed out that the fact that the “international community is begging Israel to vaccine children tells you to what extent this war has become immoral and genocidal.”
“The health sector in Gaza has been systematically destroyed and targeted,” he said, adding that a three-day pause “will never be enough to vaccinate 30 or 40 percent of Gaza’s population, which are young and children.”
He described it as “a sick joke by the Israelis to say, we offer you three days to vaccine children, knowing that the entire health sector has been destroyed” with no clinics and “no basic conditions whatsoever to provide this vaccine.”
Meanwhile, the United Nations humanitarian affairs office disclosed that Israel nearly doubled its rejections of aid missions in Gaza this month despite calls for much more assistance for desperate Palestinians.
“In August, the number of humanitarian missions and movements within Gaza that have been denied access by Israeli authorities has doubled in the north (68 vs 30) and almost doubled in the south (99 vs 53) compared with July,” the group said in a situation update.
“Between 1 and 29 August, out of the 199 planned humanitarian missions coordinated with the Israeli authorities for northern Gaza, 74 (37 percent) were facilitated, 68 (34 percent) were denied access, 42 (21 percent) were impeded (including missions that succeeded), and 15 (8 percent) were cancelled due to logistical, operational, or security issues.”
United Nations humanitarian affairs office
The International Court of Justice has issued numerous legally binding orders for Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, but Israeli authorities have instead consistently blocked large portions of humanitarian assistance.
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