Addressing the Human Rights Council before Abbas, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, warned that the recent violence between Palestinians and Israelis, if not stopped, threatened to draw the crisis “ever closer to catastrophe”.
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“The current situation is simply not sustainable”, he said.
Arab Israelis are the descendants of Palestinians who remained on their land after the creation of Israel in 1948, and are citizens of the Jewish state.
In a speech about USA foreign policy in the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for worldwide Peace in Washington, Kerry addressed a wide range of subjects, from the Iran nuclear deal to Islamic State, Tunisian democracy, and the ongoing surge of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
Abbas, who has rejected calls by Hamas to launch a new intifada or uprising, called on the United Nations security council to set up a “special regime of worldwide protection for our Palestinian people”.
He accused Israel of excessive use of force against the Palestinians, and he noted violence carried out by Jewish settlers.
President Abbas again purposefully missed an opportunity to condemn the ongoing wave of Palestinian violence and urge reconciliation and moderation, and instead, laid out his much-repeated litany of accusations, incitement and half-truths.
Palestinian leaders, though, say a wave of stabbing attacks is a response to what Abbas on Wednesday called “violations” at the al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem, a site holy to both Jews and Muslims.
Palestinians have long feared Israelis are planning to change the rules governing the site that is sacred to both Muslims and Jews, and lies in a majority Palestinian area annexed by Israel in 1967.
The shooting occurred on Wednesday near the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba after Israeli forces claimed the Palestinian was about to attack a soldier at a military post, Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported. Last week, an Israeli Jew was killed after soldiers thought he was a Palestinian attacker and earlier this month an Israeli man stabbed a Jew after mistaking his dark-skinned victim for an Arab. “Of course, jihad according to their means and what they can do inside Israel”, Kedar said. Palestinian medics say a few 2,000 Palestinians have been injured since the outbreak of violence.
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s minister of internal security, slammed Ghattas’s visit in a message on his Twitter account. When the suspects stabbed and wounded one of the soldiers, they were shot, the army said in a statement.
The casualty, whose name wasn’t immediately identified, was the third fatality on Tuesday in the West Bank.
At the weekend Israel and Jordan – the holy site’s custodian – agreed to allow surveillance cameras at Al-Aqsa, but this has hit trouble as the two locked horns over the installation.
Netanyahu has repeatedly denied plans to change the status quo.
A month ago, photographs obtained by Israeli police revealed that Palestinians were stockpiling rocks on the Temple Mount in advance of Jewish visits to the site during Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles.
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Amnesty worldwide said on Tuesday that it had found a few of the killings of Palestinians were unjustified, and that Israeli forces were using “extreme and unlawful measures”.
