Palestine calls for urgent intl. meetings on Israel’s Nablus bloodshed

Palestine has called for emergency meetings of international bodies following Israel’s deadly raid against the flashpoint West Bank city of Nablus.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki demanded that the United Nations Security Council, the Arab League, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) convene in order to denounce the Israeli carnage and ensure protection for the Palestinian people.

“We demanded that Israel be condemned for the massacres committed against the Palestinians, the latest one in Nablus, and provide international protection for the Palestinians,” he said.

The remarks came after Israeli forces violently raided Nablus, killing at least 11 Palestinians, including a teenager, and injuring more than 100 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. It marked the deadliest escalation in the occupied West Bank since 2005.

Mass funeral held in West Bank for Palestinians killed in Israeli raid on Nablus

Palestinians hold mass funeral for those martyred earlier during an Israeli military raid in northern West Bank.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Wednesday that “the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is at its most combustible in years,” with tensions being “sky high.”

“Our immediate priority must be to prevent further escalation, reduce tensions and restore calm,” he told the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

Addressing the same meeting, Palestine’s UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour demanded action against the Tel Aviv regime, noting that the timing of the Nablus massacre was not an accident as Israel knew that “the international community will be busy with another big issue” and assumed nobody will pay attention.  

“The United Nations, which is supposed to stand by the weak and the vulnerable, should stand with the Palestinian people,” he said.

“We are losing credibility, you are losing credibility, this fabulous system is losing credibility,” he added, urging the UN to use all of its resources “to put an end to these massacres against our people.”

Mansour further said it is increasingly difficult to convince the Palestinians that UN Security Council resolutions will be implemented as they keep seeing the 15-member panel adopting appropriate documents but “don’t see teeth to these resolutions.”

He also lashed out at the Israeli regime for committing “atrocities” and using “all kinds of pretenses in order to slaughter our people and to create havoc and create horror.”

Hamas says its patience is running out

Meanwhile, Abu Obeida, a spokesman of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas resistance movement, also warned that “the resistance in Gaza is monitoring the escalating crimes conducted by the enemy against our people in the occupied West Bank and is running out of patience.”

Similarly, the Islamic Jihad resistance movement said “the blood of the martyrs in Nablus has not been spilled in vain,” warning that retaliation will come “at any moment and from everywhere.”

Israel has carried out attacks against the Palestinians across the occupied territories since last December, when Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power as head of the occupying regime’s most far-right cabinet ever.

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