Palestinians continue to suffer Israeli brutality
Palestine-Iran, Politics, 4/18/2006

Iran's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Mohammad Javad Zarif delivered a key note speech to the UN Security Council on the situation in the Middle East and those of Palestine in particular.

Addressing the audience and the Council's president, he said the Council is convened to debate yet another in a series of repeated and grave crimes perpetrated by the Israeli regime against the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territories.

"Indeed, in the course of the past six decades, Palestinians have been subjected to daily brutality by the Israeli regime, and their most basic legitimate and inalienable rights have been systematically violated.

"The realities on the ground abundantly suggest that the systematic pattern of human rights violations and massive breaches of international law and international humanitarian law by Israel have been continuing unabated, resulting in the killing of almost 4000 Palestinians since September 2000," he said.

"Recent military operations against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, have but added to the misery and suffering that the Palestinian people have long endured. As a consequence of such military campaign, the casualties and destruction inflicted on the Palestinian people continue to rise. In fact, Israel's deadly air strikes and shelling of Gaza are part of a larger policy marked with state terrorism, expansionism, aggression and oppression," he pointed out.

The recent reports indicate that the continuous and increased violation of the rights and aspiration of the Palestinian people by the Israeli regime has resulted in the deterioration of the situation to an unprecedented and unbearable level.

Increased military operations in densely populated areas especially in the Gaza Strip, indiscriminate use of force by the Israeli army, the practice of collective punishment, extrajudicial killings, targeted assassinations, the expansion of settlements and the criminal attack by Israeli forces on Jericho Prison to abduct some Palestinian prisoners on March 14, 2006, which happened only a few minutes after American and British observers left the prison, are but clear breaches of basic international standards and law, committed by Israel in the Palestinian territories.

Moreover, in defiance of the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice and the unambiguous calls of the international community, the Israeli regime not only continues the construction of the illegal wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but has even accelerated plans for the completion of the wall, while the settlement construction and land confiscations in the West Bank and other parts of the Palestinian territories is continuing unabated, Zarif said.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today that Palestine is not only a concern of Middle East countries and Muslims but the main priority of all lovers of mankind and free peoples of the world.

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