A group of Jewish settlers under the protection of Israeli soldiers raids the Old City area of Hebron, West Bank on August 17, 2024. [Wisam Hashlamoun – Anadolu Agency]
Israel’s ongoing attacks in the occupied West Bank, where Hamas is not in power, “are a powerful reminder that Hamas is just the last excuse for the State of #Israel to wreak the Palestinian territory havoc,” UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, said in a tweet yesterday.
“The widespread devastation and massacres of the Israeli army in #Jenin and other parts of occupied northern West Bank, where Hamas is not ruling, are a powerful reminder that Hamas is just the last excuse for the State of #Israel to wreak the Palestinian territory havoc,” she wrote, adding: “Everywhere for 57 years Israel has made life impossible for Palestinians under a brutal military occupation, seeking to realize a “#GreaterIsrael”.”
She called for an international protection presence to be “immediately deployed to stop the massacres, wanton destruction and forced displacement.”
This comes after Israel launched its largest military campaign in the occupied West Bank in 20 years, during which it has destroyed some 70 per cent of Jenin’s infrastructure, according to local officials, and besieged medical facilities, stopped ambulances from reaching the sick and wounded and rounded up and detained hundreds of Palestinian men.
Reacting to Israel’s attacks, Albanese said: “Israel claims that what it is doing in the West Bank is justified under the law of self-defence. This claim has no validity.
Twenty years ago the @CIJ_ICJ 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.”
In a landmark advisory opinion on 19 July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land “illegal”, called for the evacuation of all existing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and for reparations to be paid to Palestinians.
Source: middleeastmonitor
