Ambassador Dan Shapiro’s supposed misstep was to observe in a speech to a security conference that Israel applies the law differently to Israelis and Palestinians living in the West Bank.
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According to the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, Shapiro based his comment on their data, which showed an 85 percent failure rate in investigating hate-crimes by Israelis against Palestinians, AP reported.
The European Foreign Ministers ruled at their monthly council meeting Monday that all agreements between the EU and Israel must “unequivocally and explicitly indicate their inapplicability to the territories occupied by Israel in 1967”.
“If these employers truly cared about the financial wellbeing of Palestinians, they should be lobbying their own government to lift its discriminatory restrictions and end its settlement policies”, she said.
Titled “Occupation, Inc.: How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights”, the report suggests that by operating in Israeli settlements or by engaging with settlement businesses, companies are contributing to these human rights abuses.
The settlements are considered illegal under global law and the PA says they are one of the major obstacles to reaching an eventual peace deal. The US ambassador to Israel also criticized Israel’s West Bank settlement policies.
It said it “understands the serious nature of the controversy surrounding real estate operations in the West Bank and has been working to a find a resolution that is acceptable to all parties”.
Israeli ambulances which arrived on scene took the wounded Palestinian teenager to an Israeli hospital.
Noting that Israel stated its support for establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, Shapiro said this prospect becomes increasingly hard to achieve due to the expansion of the settlements.
But Israel responded that the statement was discriminatory and downplayed the role of Palestine in the stalled Middle East peace talks.
“Whoever wants to see the truth about the roots of the conflict between us and the Palestinians should come to Otniel and see here a wonderful family that only wants coexistence and peace”.
Daniel Shapiro said that Washington was “concerned and perplexed” over Israel’s strategy of building West Bank settlements.
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Shapiro added that the two-state solution is the only way to prevent Israel from turning into a bi-national state, and said a way must be found to preserve its viability. In the past four months, 25 Israelis have been killed, as well as an American and three others, by Palestinians wielding knives, guns and even potato peelers in what authorities here have called “a new kind of terror” by leaderless, angry and frustrated youths.
