United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged Israel to instantly “cease all settlement activities” in occupied Palestinian West Bank. The Secretary-General described Israel’s strategies to speed up settlement expansion as heightening “tensions and violence” and posing a significant obstacle to long-term peace.
The UN Secretary-General made these comments after five Palestinians died, including a 15-year-old child, and over 90 injured, in the bloodiest confrontation in years, which occurred after Israeli soldiers stormed the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
In the first such incident in nearly 20 years, Israel dispatched helicopter gunships that launched rocket missiles on targets in the Jenin camp.
Palestinian fighters were also engaged in hours-long combat with firearms and explosives, rendering several Israeli army vehicles useless and confining soldiers inside their territory. According to witnesses, eight Israeli soldiers suffered injuries during the roughly 10-hour battle.
“The Secretary-General reiterates that, settlements are a flagrant violation of international law,” Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson to the Secretary-General, said in a statement.
“The expansion of these illegal settlements is a significant driver of tensions and violence and deepens humanitarian needs. It further entrenches Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, encroaches on Palestinian land and natural resources, hampers the free movement of the Palestinian population, and undermines the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and sovereignty.”
UN Gen. Secretary Antonio Guterres.
Haq stated that Guterres was “deeply troubled” by Israel’s choice to revise settlement planning processes, which would fasten arrangements for new settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as Israel’s planning authorities’ approval of over 4,000 settlement housing units.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved proposals for thousands of new settlement units in the occupied West Bank, has delegated the far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich broad powers to hasten settlement development, which international law frowns against it.
The authorization of 4,560 housing units across multiple West Bank districts, has been placed on the schedules on Israel’s Supreme Planning Council, which convenes next week.
Israel’s settlement expansion appears to be putting Netanyahu at odds with his closest ally, the US. The United States said, it was “deeply troubled” by the settlement expansion plan and reports of changes to the procedures for planning and approval of settlements on occupied Palestinian land.
Moreover, Palestinian parties have also expressed grave distress that, Israel would soon seize control of the whole West Bank. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry described the approval of settlement activities as a “dangerous escalation to complete the annexation of the West Bank.”
According to Khaled Elgindy, a Senior Associate at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, the UN chief’s heavy remarks should now be followed up by measures on the ground.
“The actions of this Israeli government, they’ve accelerated virtually every negative trend that you can imagine from the violence on the ground, to settlement expansion, to evictions, to building and expanding settlements. Unless the very strong words are combined with some sort of action by key players, like the United States or the European Union, some sort of consequence to these actions, then they are simply going to be ignored as they always have been. So there really needs to be action on the ground to back up these strong words, and we just haven’t seen that at all.”
Khaled Elgindy, Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute In Washington D.C.
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