UN says West Bank is part of Palestinian territory
Al Jazeera asked Farhan Haq, the UN spokesman for the secretary-general, for a response to the comments made by the nominee for the US ambassador to the UN about the occupied West Bank.
Elise Stefanik on Tuesday had told US senators that she agreed that Israel had a “biblical right” to the occupied West Bank.
Here’s what Haq said:
“Our response is that the West Bank is part of the occupied Palestinian territories, and of course, as such, the future of that of the West Bank, Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories as a whole needs to be dealt with through negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinian authorities.”
‘The battlefield is about to shift’: West Bank braces for rising violence
When the Gaza ceasefire was announced on January 15, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were overjoyed that Israel’s devastating war on the besieged enclave would finally end.
However, Israeli state violence has quickly escalated across the West Bank in what local monitors and analysts describe as an apparent attempt to formally annex more land.
The sudden uptick in settler attacks and Israeli military operations has frightened Palestinians in the occupied territory, who believe they could now face the same kind of violence meted out to their countrymen and women in Gaza.
“We watched a genocide unfold in Gaza for 14 months and nobody in the world did anything to stop it, and some people here think we’ll suffer a similar fate,” said Shady Abdullah, a journalist and human rights activist from Tulkarem.
“We all know we fear that the situation could get much worse here in the West Bank,” he told Al Jazeera
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