World ‘at a crossroads’ over Gaza: UNRWA chief
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN refugee agency for Palestinians, has called for “political courage to defend and reinforce the multilateral system and the international rules-based order”.
In an article he wrote for The Guardian newspaper, he said the international community would have to choose between a world “where we have reneged on our commitment to provide a political answer to the question of Palestine”, or otherwise.
He called it “a dystopian world, where Israel, as the occupying power, is solely responsible for the population in the occupied Palestinian territory”.
Lazzarini stressed that in the other direction “lies a world where the guardrails of the rules-based order hold firm and the Palestinian question is resolved by political means”. “This is the path currently being pursued by the global alliance for the implementation of the two-state solution,” the UNRWA chief added.
Lazzarini also stressed that Israel continued to claim that UNRWA is “infiltrated by Hamas, even though all allegations for which evidence has been offered have been thoroughly investigated”.
British politician highlights UK’s complicity in Israeli war crimes
Iqbal Mohamed, an independent member of parliament in the United Kingdom, has accused the British government of directly and indirectly supporting Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.
“I’m afraid that the British government, when these war criminals are brought to justice, will also be indicted for being complicit in these war crimes,” he told the Anadolu news agency.
Mohamed, part of the Independent Alliance group of five MPs supporting Gaza including former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, condemned Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
“It’s very simple. We need to stop the killing of innocent civilians in Gaza, north, south, across the region, in the West Bank, the settlements,” he said.
“How much more killing should there be before the British government will stop in its direct and indirect support of Israel committing war crimes? They don’t want to call it a genocide. It is a genocide.
“They don’t want to call it ethnic cleansing. It is ethnic cleansing. They don’t want to call it mass murder. It is mass murder,” Mohamed said.
Mohamed called on the UK government to take action against Israel.
“We want the government to stop with the talking and start acting. Thirty [arms] licences banned out of 350 is not enough. The parts that go to supply the repair of the F-35s must stop. They are the biggest, most common killing machine,” he said.
“What will these decision-makers, the prime minister, the foreign secretary, the whole cabinet and the people across the House supporting Israel’s right to commit genocide, what will their children and their grandchildren say when they grow up?”
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