Palestinian Foreign Minister Varsen Aghabekian has said that Israel is deliberately pushing Palestinians toward impossible conditions, telling the UN Security Council that “the Israeli government seeks the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.”
“It considers chaos in the West Bank, like destruction in Gaza, as a means to force people to leave, by creating impossible conditions of life,” she said on Tuesday.
“Israel’s withholding of our tax revenues is not merely a financial matter. It is an existential threat against Palestinian institutions and the people they serve,” said Aghabekian.
Noting the violence gripping Palestinian communities, she told the Council that “in 2019, illegal settlers shot and killed 38-year-old Hamdi Al-Na’san, a father and a husband.”
“A few days ago, in an attack by Israeli soldiers and settlers near a school in Al-Mghayyer, Aws Al-Na’san, the 14-year-old son of Hamdi, was himself shot dead. A father and a son killed a few years apart, victims of the same violence,” she added.
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‘This is not a religious conflict’
“The world condemned settler terrorism then and condemned it again now. But our communities, our people, and our children were never afforded the protection they deserve, the protection they are entitled to, and the protection they desperately need,” she said.
Rejecting what she called a distortion of the conflict’s nature, Aghabekian told the Council that “this is not a religious conflict,” and urged all nations to reject “the outrageous claim that persecution of Palestinians is justified by a so-called war between the Judeo-Christian civilization against Islamic barbarism.”
