The school year was supposed to have started at this honorable facility in occupied East Jerusalem. Instead, Israeli forces closed it down last month, depriving hundreds of students of the chance to learn. The government handed the land over to the Israeli-controlled municipality of Jerusalem. Israeli forces also seized the Honora headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem, disregarding the privileges and protections afforded to the UN. Dreams never die Sudanese refugee struggles as aid cuts hit Kenya
The law against it, if the United Nations has done so little to protect its own. Many Palestinians ask what it could do to help them. It was at the UN that Israel gained a foothold in historic Palestine. A partition plan that was supposed to give Palestinians a share of the land, too. Then, in 1993, the Oslo Accords, signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, created the Palestinian Authority, an interim body meant to lead to statehood. Cambodia scam crackdown drives cybercrime networks worldwide
But Israel is deliberately preventing that state from ever taking shape. Israel has built settlements strategically, squeezing Palestinian communities into increasingly smaller pockets of land, fragmented, separated, and isolated from one another. Palestinian communities are divided by the Israeli separation wall and illegal settlements, preventing them from coming together to form a single unified territory.
In 1980, there were fewer than 30,000 settlers in the occupied West Bank. Today, the number stands at nearly 800,000, and it is set to increase with Israel advancing the E1 settlement project. E1 aims to connect illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank with other illegal Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, practically cutting the occupied West Bank in half, effectively a death blow for any future Palestinian state.
The project would also displace hundreds of bedins who have lived on these lands for decades. The international community has abandoned us, but a drowning man will clutch a destroyer. Facing the Israeli settlement campaign, we hope international law will save what’s left of our lands. Israel has refused to implement countless UN resolutions, including the General Assembly’s deadline for Israel to end its illegal occupation. Tigray tensions rise as Ethiopian Airlines suspends flights to three airports
That resolution followed an international court of justice decision that ruled Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory was unlawful. The deadline has passed. No mechanism to enforce it. This will be the second consecutive United Nations General Assembly session where the Palestinian president has not been granted a US visa to attend in person.
It’s also the second session to take place while tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the occupied West Bank remain displaced from their refugee camps. But nearly 80 years of sessions have passed, and little has been done to protect Palestinians or get them any closer to an independent state of their own.
