In advance of the Ramallah meeting, Rudeinah said Palestinians were expecting Kerry to provide clear American and Israeli answers as to whether Israel remained committed to the two-state solution and to serious efforts on drawing future borders and resolving core issues including Jerusalem.
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“And today I express my complete condemnation for any act of terror that takes innocent lives and disrupts the day-to-day life of a nation”.
The farce at the General Assembly underscores a simple fact: the U.N.’s automatic majority has no interest in truly helping Palestinians, nor in protecting anyone’s human rights; the goal of these ritual, one-sided condemnations remains the scapegoating of Israel. “And it will and it is”, he said.
Kerry was to travel to the West Bank for discussions with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas later on Tuesday.
The violence, fuelled in part by Muslim agitation over increased Jewish visits to East Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound – Islam’s third holiest site and also revered by Jews as the location of two biblical-era temples, prompted Kerry to come and sound out both sides on Tuesday.
More than half of the Palestinians killed have been alleged attackers, while others were shot during demonstrations and protests against the Israeli security forces.
However, Kerry’s words ignore what the discrepancy in the number of lives lost reveals: Israelis encounter violence through (the fear of) occasional, isolated attacks, while Palestinians are subject to a regime of systematic extrajudicial killings, dispossession, displacement, and political persecution.
The recent wave of knife attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers is the subject of an “artistic performance” from the Palestinian standpoint that has ben viewed over 250,000 online.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, including children, while thousands have been injured as the Israeli army uses live ammunition against the anti-occupation Palestinian protesters who resist using stones and rocks. They have also described the violence as a outcome of Israel’s occupation.
It fails to state that the Israeli soldier was actually killed in this stabbing attack on the very same day of the Palestinian teen terror attack.
According to Kerry, once a state says “terrorist”, it can enact violence, entirely justified and unconstrained, against whomever it wishes – even an entire population.
In Jenin, Palestinian security sources told Ma’an that Israeli forces detained Wissam Iyad Hannoun, 20, from the Jenin refugee camp after raiding his home. The official said Israel would not agree to any freeze in settlement construction.
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Ibrahim Abdul Haleem Dawood, 16, was shot in the heart during clashes with Israeli forces in Ramallah, the statement added, adding that several operations to try to save him had failed.
