Ambassador Ala: The Israeli aggression in Palestine and Syria amounts to war crimes and a violation of international law

Geneva (ST): Syria’s permanent representative to the United Nations and international organizations in Geneva, Ambassador Husam El-Din Ala, affirmed that the acts of Israeli aggression in Palestine and Syria have become a consistent pattern of reckless behavior that violates international law and pushes the region into an unprecedented state of tension and confrontation.

Ala said in a statement during today’s meeting of the Human Rights Council on the human rights situation in Palestine and the other occupied Arab territories: The repeated Israeli attacks on Syrian lands, and their deliberate targeting of civilian facilities, including ports and airports, constitute practices that violate international law and war crimes that expose the lives of Syrians are at risk, and it threatens the safety of civil aviation in Syria and the region, and the work of humanitarian agencies that use these airports and seaports to deliver humanitarian aid, as well as endangering regional and international peace and security.

Ala added: In light of the policy of silence, and the double standards that control the attitudes of Western countries that favor “Israel”, the occupying power continues to commit massacres and crimes against the Palestinian people, violate their basic rights, subject Palestinians to collective punishment through the suffocating siege in Gaza, and demolish homes, confiscation of property in occupied Jerusalem, closing entire areas in the West Bank, imposing restrictions on the movement of its residents, in addition to arbitrary arrests, torture of prisoners in occupation prisons, forced displacement, and depriving Palestinians of freely practicing their religious rites.

Ala continued: The martyrdom of the seven-year-old Palestinian child Rayan Suleiman yesterday after he was chased by the Israeli occupation forces near his school, and his father was prevented from taking him to the hospital  is a tragic reminder of the crimes of the occupation authorities, and that they must be held accountable for those crimes.

Ala explained that the Israeli occupation authorities continue their systematic violations of human rights in the occupied Syrian Golan, and deprive the Syrian citizens from enjoying their rights to education, health, work, food, shelter, decent living, freedom of movement and residence, and continue to confiscate their lands, and besiege their villages and cities with projects to prevent them from demographic and urban expansion, to subject them to discriminatory treatment, to impose heavy financial burdens on their access to water, electricity, and health care, and to obstruct the marketing of their agricultural products, which constitute the main source of their livelihood, with the aim of forcing them to leave or accept the occupation, and its illegal decision to impose its mandate on the occupied Golan, in violation of relevant United Nations resolutions, including Security Council Resolution 497 of 1981.

K.Q.