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(LifeSiteNews) — The State of Palestine’s UN representative issued a stirring rebuke at the UN Security Council following the United States’ veto of a fourth ceasefire resolution aimed at bringing the genocidal Israeli retaliatory assault upon the Gaza Strip to an end.
“There is no right to mass killing of civilians. There is no right to starve an entire civilian population. There is no right to forcibly displace a people. And there is no right to annexation,” said deputy UN ambassador for Palestine Majed Bamya on November 20.
“This is what Israel is doing in Gaza. These are its war objectives. This is what the absence of a ceasefire is allowing it to continue doing,” he admonished at the beginning of his remarks.
The measure failed in a vote of 14 to 1 with every other member state of the 15-member body, including the UK, supporting it. The five permanent members of the UNSC—the U.S., U.K., France, Russia and China—all have veto authority.
Sponsored by the other 10 elected nations to the council, the resolution demanded “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire to be respected by all parties.” It further reiterated “its demand for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.”
Despite the resolution calling for this “unconditional release” of Israeli hostages in Gaza, the U.S. justified its defiance of the rest of the council, and the vast majority of the world, because the measure didn’t make the hostage release a condition for the ceasefire.
After expressing regret that “this Council finds itself here again,” U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood offered that their delegation “worked for weeks in good faith to avoid this outcome. We made clear throughout negotiations we could not support an unconditional ceasefire that failed to release the hostages.”
‘Full-fledged Israeli assault about everything except the hostages’
“What does it mean that release of the hostages should be unconditional?” Bamya asked in a seeming direct response to this position. “But stopping killing Palestinians is conditional? There are acceptable conditions to stop the mass killing of Palestinians?”
“There’s a hundred Israeli hostages and there’s two million Palestinians in Gaza, two million,” he emphasized. “They deserve better. They deserve respect for their lives, for their suffering.”
“There’s no justification, no justification whatsoever for vetoing a resolution trying to stop atrocities,” the diplomat exclaimed.
READ: The West cannot hide’: Compelling documentary presents Israel’s ‘live stream genocide’ in Gaza
“This full-fledged Israeli assault against the Palestinian people and the Palestinian land is about everything except the hostages. If the families of hostages can see that, how can anyone in this room claim otherwise?” Bamya challenged.
“You are saying we cannot be for an unconditional ceasefire that does not release the hostages. Is this war releasing the hostages?” the diplomat challenged. “Is it even trying to release the hostages? So what does it mean? We accept this war that is killing hostages. And that is killing, maiming, terrorizing, [and] destroying an entire nation?”
Israeli attack not about saving the hostages as it continues to kill them
Just last Saturday, Hamas reported that Israeli shelling in Northern Gaza killed a female Israeli hostage. They further stipulated that another Israeli captive detained in the same area was in danger of death. Other reports indicate the Israeli army has killed other hostages even while they claim their rescue to be a primary goal for their operation.
Louis Har, a former Israeli hostage who was rescued in February told an Israeli media outlet in June that during his captivity, “Our greatest fear was the IDF’s planes and the concern that they would bomb the building we were in,” and not their Hamas captors.
“What needs to be done is getting all the hostages back at any price and under any condition,” Har said at the time. “That is what’s most important now. Human life is above everything.”
Also, as Christian leaders in the Holy Land have lamented, Israel has arrested and maintained thousands of Palestinian political prisoners (i.e. “hostages”) for decades, often holding them without charges or trial. These include children who are likewise subject to significant abuse. Today, such Palestinian hostages being held by Israel number around 9,000.
READ: How do Christians in the Holy Land understand the Israeli occupation of Palestine?
Har also emphasized that it was in the hope of exchanging him and others for the many hostages being held by Israel which motivated their abduction on October 7, 2023. “The people who kept watch over us were really just keeping watch and wanted to make the exchange with their own people, and they made sure we were OK.”
Bamya went on in his statement to plead for the innocent lives of all. “A ceasefire will allow (us) to save lives. All lives. This was true a year ago. This is even more true today. A ceasefire doesn’t resolve everything, but it is the first step towards resolving anything.”
‘Are Palestinian lives not worth saving or does Israel have a license to kill?’
“The world should not grow accustomed to the death of Palestinians, to seeing Palestinian children starving, to seeing mothers carrying their children from one place to another forcibly displaced,” the diplomat continued.
“They should not get accustomed to seeing journalists killed and humanitarians killed. To see Palestinians detained, abducted, carried on trucks, to go be tortured, sexually abused and raped.
READ: Israel sodomizes and kills Palestinian detainees, Candace Owens calls out silent Christians
“The fact we are Palestinians does not make that less shocking or less outrageous,” he rebuked. “Maybe for some we have the wrong nationality, the wrong faith, the wrong skin color. But we are humans and we should be treated as such!”
Israel is killing Palestinian civilians ‘purposefully, deliberately, repeatedly, massively. Nobody can deny it.’
Addressing the apparent double-standard in how international law is interpreted and applied to Israel as opposed to other nations, he asked, “Is there a UN charter for Israel that is different from the charter you all have?”
“Is there an international law for them, and an international law for us? Do they have the right to kill and the only right we have is to die?” he appealed. “It is so glaring, so undeniable. You are witnessing the attempt to annihilate a nation, destroy a nation. It is not even hidden. It is in plain sight.”
“Yet the very tools designed to respond to these situations are not being used,” Bamya condemned. “So which one is it? Are Palestinian lives not worth saving or does Israel have a license to kill?”
READ: Israel’s Zionist ideology the ‘principal cause’ of the war in the Middle East: eminent scholar
The U.S. lone vote and veto against the resolution sends “a dangerous message to Israel that it can continue executing its plans.”
“Israel is responsible for the Palestinian civilians it kills,” he continued. “It cannot be absolved of that responsibility. It is killing them purposefully, deliberately, repeatedly, massively. It is starving them on purpose. Nobody can deny it.”
As has been attested to from multiple UN agencies and NGOs, “this is by design.” Bamya repeated, asserting it remains “clear that Israel had never an intention to accept a ceasefire” and they “will always claim conditions have not been met because (their) plans require it to continue this war, to annex the land and destroy the people.”
Expelling the Palestinian people has always been a goal of Zionism
In an interview in November of last year, Colonel Douglas Macgregor emphasized the long-standing goal of the Zionist project to expel the Palestinian people from the land they have lived on for centuries, calling it “the first stage in a multistage operation designed to create ‘greater Israel’ from the Jordan River all the way to the Mediterranean.” The Israelis have made this goal “abundantly clear off-and-on for many years. This is not a secret. Now it’s happening.”
READ: Col. Macgregor: The ‘top priority’ for Israel is to make Gaza ‘unlivable,’ expel all survivors
According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, the notion of expelling all Arabs from the land “is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.” Indeed, in the late 1930s, David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, stated, “After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” He later projected in 1941, “it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.”
In 1947-48, this project began in earnest when Jewish forces compelled more than 700,000 Palestinians to flee for their lives abandoning their homes, lands, and livelihoods. The Zionist army then barred them from returning. These people, with their descendants, make up more than 5.9 million refugees distributed in Gaza (70 percent of the overall population), Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank, with the right to return to their homeland recognized under international law.
‘We are not born to be occupied and killed and displaced’
As he approached the closing of his remarks, the Palestinian diplomat pleaded, “there is a world out there where Palestinian children are able to grow. We are not born to be occupied and killed and displaced. That’s not our destiny. That’s not our fate. There is a world where we could live and grow and see our children grow with no occupation, no bombs, no tents, no settlements, no walls, no military checkpoints, no prisons, no constant humiliation, no oppression, no house demolition, no amputations, no pain and no agony.”
“That world can exist today if we were to act. And the fact we are not means that many, many more Palestinians will suffer, and others will suffer,” Bamya said. “It’s this future that is being destroyed before our very eyes. And the entire Palestinian civilian population is the primary victim.”
INFOGRAPHIC| 404 Days of Devastation: Key statistics on the toll of Israeli genocide on #Gaza’s population and infrastructure. pic.twitter.com/Dhn0N2sBC1
— Euro-Med Monitor (@EuroMedHR) November 13, 2024
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U.S. citizens: Tell U.S. Senate to reject new ‘anti-terrorism’ bill