Recognise Palestine now to avoid ‘deadly status quo’, says its UK ambassador
Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, at a Tolpuddle Martyrs festival rally in July 2024
Making recognition of a Palestinian state subject to ever more conditions will only reinforce a “deadly status quo” and will be seen as siding with an apartheid regime, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK has said.
Writing in the Guardian, Husam Zomlot made an impassioned plea to the Labour government to fulfil a manifesto commitment by recognising Palestine in the run-up to a high-level UN conference on the two-state solution in New York next week.
Zomlot wrote: “Recognition is neither a reward for one party nor a punishment for another. It is a long-overdue affirmation of the Palestinian people’s unconditional right to exist and live freely in our homeland.”
Discussions behind the scenes between western powers are going down to the wire before the conference starting on 17 June, while the US is warning that the conference is counterproductive and should be boycotted. At issue is whether a group of countries that have not yet recognised Palestine do so around the conference or instead say recognition is being offered but on a credible timeline and subject to conditions. France and the UK are conferring intensely.
Attack dogs: how Europe supplies Israel with brutal canine weapons
Military dogs involved in attacks on Palestinian civilians – including children – are likely to have been exported from European countries, investigation finds
It was only seconds after soldiers entered the Hashash family’s home in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank that the dog attack began. As military raids rolled out across her neighbourhood one morning in February 2023, Amani Hashash says she took her four children into a bedroom. When she heard Israeli military coming into their home she called out that they were inside and posed no threat.
Moments later the bedroom door was opened and a large, unmuzzled dog launched itself into the room, plunging its teeth into her three-year-old son, Ibrahim, who was asleep in her lap. Hashash fought to get the animal away as it mauled and shook her screaming son and started to drag him out of the room. “But it was such a big dog, not like any other dog I have seen,” she says. “It kept biting and pulling my son away from me. I screamed and hit it, but it kept pulling at him.”
She says she begged the soldiers to call off the attack but they couldn’t control the animal. By the time they managed to drag the dog away, Ibrahim was unconscious and bleeding heavily. The soldiers injected Ibrahim with sedatives and called an ambulance, which took him to hospital where he was rushed into surgery.
“When I saw his wounds I was distraught because they were so extensive,” says Hashash. “The doctors said his condition was critical. One wound was six and a half centimetres, another was four centimetres. There were so many wounds the dog had caused, it hadn’t left any of Ibrahim’s back untouched."
Ibrahim needed 42 stitches for internal and external injuries and 21 injections to treat an infection contracted from the bites. Photographs of the injuries sustained in the attack seen by the Guardian and ARIJ show extensive wounding and bite marks.
More than a year later, Hashash says Ibrahim still has nightmares and his wounds have not healed. “They did this to terrorise us,” she says. Hashash says one of the Israeli commanders had told her that the dog had been trained to attack the first person it saw. “He’s just a child,” she says. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
The IDF refused to comment on the case.
The dog that attacked Ibrahim is likely to have been a Belgian malinois, which Hashash identified from pictures of different dogs used by the military. Originally used to herd sheep, the breed is now widely used by Oketz, Israel’s specialist canine unit, feted in Israel and widely feared across the Palestinian territories.
According to an investigation by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) and the Guardian, it is also likely that the animal used was sent to Israel from Europe, where a steady flow of dogs are traded from specialist trainers into the ranks of the Israeli military.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jun/12/weapons-war-israel-europe-dogs-joint-investigation
Last year, commanders in the Oketz unit told US urban warfare researcher John Spencer, who has embedded with the IDF on multiple operations, that 99% of the approximately 70 military dogs it buys every year were sourced from companies in Europe, a figure that the IDF did not dispute when asked to confirm.
One organisation, Euro Med Human Rights Monitor, says it has documented 146 cases of attack dogs being used against civilians by the Israeli army since October 2023.
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In the West Bank, the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq has also documented 18 cases of military dog attacks on civilians since October 2023, including children.
The UN says that the use of military dogs against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention throughout the war constitutes a violation of international human rights law. According to testimonies from former detainees reported by Physicians for Human Rights, dogs have been ordered to bite and maul prisoners and urinated and defecated on them.
Amnesty International says that the use of dogs against civilians needs to be urgently recognised in legal instruments and laws regulating the use and sale of conventional weapons.
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