Rights Groups Call on UN, International Community to Oppose Israeli Annexation Plan

Haifa, MINA – In an oral intervention yesterday at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and four partner Palestinian human rights organizations called on the United Nations and the international community to vehemently oppose Israel’s looming annexation of large swaths of the occupied Palestinian West Bank and to push for the dismantling of all Israeli settlements.

Adalah and partner groups warned that annexation will normalize Israel’s colonial project and amounts to apartheid via the continued expansion and construction of illegal settlements, displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, and demographic manipulation, WAFA reported.

“The Israeli plan would further entrench racial, ethnic, and religious segregation as a legal norm, and Israel will formally establish itself as the sole sovereign regime over the Palestinian people in historic Palestine,” they said.

Later that same day, 47 UN special rapporteurs issued a biting denunciation of Israel’s West Bank annexation plan, calling it “a vision of 21st century apartheid”.

The oral intervention, presented in the context of Item 9 racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance, follow-up and implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, was delivered by Nada Awad of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies to the 43rd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on behalf of Adalah, Al-Haq – Law in Service of Man, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC), and Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights.(T/R3/RE1)

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)