Solving Palestine issue remains ‘main constant’ of Saudi policy: Envoy

LONDON: Solving the Palestinian issue and alleviating the suffering of the Palestinian people are among the main constants of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy, and it will continue to support the Palestinian cause at all levels, the Kingdom’s permanent representative to the UN in Geneva has said.
During an interactive dialogue held on Friday by the Human Rights Council in Geneva with the Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories Michael Lynk, Dr. Abdul Aziz Al-Wasel urged the international community to push toward realizing the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
He said that the world faces great challenges due to the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, which have added to the woes of the Palestinian people on top of the occupation.
Al-Wasel said that Lynk’s report “clearly demonstrates the deterioration of the human rights situation of Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, in addition to the recent escalation of violence in the Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan neighborhoods, the accompanying forced evictions of Palestinian families from their homes, and the use of excessive force inside the Al-Aqsa mosque and prevention of the entry of worshipers during the month of Ramadan.”

Lynk, who is also a UN human rights investigator, said in his report that Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank amount to a war crime, adding that they violate an absolute ban on an occupying power transferring part of its civilian population into an occupied territory, thereby meeting the definition of a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Al-Wasel called for the need to implement the UN recommendations, and to work hard to curb systematic and continuous rights violations.
(With Reuters)