The Palestinian Foreign Ministry says the “double standards” adopted by the international community in dealing with global issues have emboldened the Israeli regime to keep committing crimes against the Palestinians.
In a statement on Monday, the ministry said Israel persists in “stealing the Palestinian land” and violates the “signed agreements, the international law, the UN resolutions.”
The ministry also denounced the killing of Yamen Nafez Jafal, 16, at the hands of Israeli forces. Palestinian sources said Jafal was injured by Israeli forces when they stormed the village of Abu Dis in East al-Quds on Sunday. Israeli troops barred an ambulance from reaching the injured as he was bleeding. The sources said Jafal was pronounced dead after he was taken to hospital.
The Tel Aviv regime has been criticized for its extensive use of lethal force against and extrajudicial killing of the Palestinians who do not pose an immediate threat to the occupation forces or to the Israeli settlers.
Earlier in the day, the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas condemned the killing of Jafal as a “full-fledged war crime.”
The foreign ministry also stated that Israel is exploiting the current global circumstances “in the most horrific way” in order to expand its settlements and force the displacement of Palestinians “in a bid to abolish the Palestinian presence in al-Quds and all areas classified as ‘Area C’ in the West Bank.”
Area C, which is under full Israeli control, makes up more than 60 percent of the entire occupied West Bank, and would form a significant part of a future Palestine state.
Israel occupied East al-Quds, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War in 1967. It later had to withdraw from Gaza. More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank. All the settlements are illegal under international law. The United Nations Security Council has condemned the settlement activities in several resolutions.