ISRAEL BLOCKADING PALESTINIANS OF CLEAN WATER- U.N. RIGHTS EXPERT
Israel is depriving millions of Palestinians of access to a regular
supply of clean water while stripping their land of minerals “in an apparent
act of pillage”, a United Nations human rights investigator said on Monday.
Michael Lynk, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian
territories, said that Israel “continues full-steam with settlement expansion”
in the West Bank, which the United Nations and many countries deem illegal.
There are some 20-25,000 new settlers a year, he said.
He was addressing the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose debate Israel’s
delegation boycotted due to what it considers a deep bias against it. “In his
latest farcical report, Mr. Lynk stoops to a new low and (accuses) the Jewish
State of stealing,” Israel’s mission in Geneva said in a statement to Reuters.
It accused Lynk of being a “known Palestinian advocate”.
Michael Lynk, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights |
Israel’s main ally, the United States, quit the 47-member forum last
year, also accusing it of an anti-Israel slant.
“In Gaza, the collapse of the coastal aquifer, the only natural source of
drinking water in the Strip and now almost entirely unfit for human
consumption, is contributing to a significant health crisis among the two
million Palestinians living there,” Lynk said.
Despite the withdrawal of Israeli settlers and troops from Gaza in 2005,
it has maintained a “hermetic seal of air, sea and land blockade” around the
coastal enclave, he said.
An internationally-sponsored $567 million plan has been agreed to address
Gaza’s acute shortage of clean water by constructing desalination plants, but
analysts say its realization is years away.
“For nearly five million Palestinians living under occupation, the
degradation of their water supply, the exploitation of their natural resources
and the defacing of their environment are symptomatic of the lack of any
meaningful control they have over their daily lives,” Lynk said.
In the West Bank, Israeli quarry companies extract some 17 million tonnes
of stone each year, “notwithstanding strict prohibitions in international law
against a military power economically exploiting an occupied territory”, Lynk
said.
“The Dead Sea and its plentiful natural resources, part of which lies
within the occupied Palestinian territory, is off-limits to any Palestinian
development while Israeli companies are permitted to harvest the minerals in an
apparent act of pillage,” he added.
Israeli authorities have said in the past that Palestinian quarries were
ordered shut because they posed safety and environmental risks.
Palestinian Ambassador Ibrahim Khraishi called for Israel to halt what he
said was theft of Palestinian property.
SOURCE: Reuters
No comments