Mr. President,
At the outset, I wish to extend our sincere congratulations upon your election as President of the United Nations General Assembly this session and to express our gratitude and appreciation to H.E. Mr. John Ashe for his able leadership of the past session.
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
In this year, in which this Assembly, on behalf of the countries and peoples of the world, conveyed the world’s yearning and determination to realize a just peace that achieves freedom and independence for the Palestinian people in their State of Palestine alongside Israel in order to rectify the historic injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people in Al-Nakba of 1948, the occupying Power has chosen to defy the entire world by launching its war on Gaza, by which its jets and tanks brutally assassinated lives and devastated the homes, schools and dreams of thousands of Palestinian children, women and men and in reality destroying the remaining hopes for peace.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have addressed you in this hall during similar days in 2012 and cautioned that the colonial occupying Power was preparing for a new Nakba against the Palestinian people, and I appealed to you: Prevent a new Nakba. Support the establishment of a free and independent State of Palestine now.
I returned to this same hall two months later as Palestine was healing her wounds and her people were burying beloved martyred children, women and men after yet another war waged then against the Gaza Strip, and that day I stated: certainly there was not a single person in the world needing the loss of the lives of tens of Palestinian children in order to confirm that Israel insists on occupation; and there was also no need for thousands of deadly raids and tons of explosives to remind the world that there is an occupation that must end and that there is a people that must be freed.
I also said at that time: there was no need for a new devastating war in order to realize the absence of peace.
And, here we are again today.
Here we find ourselves, full of grief, regret and bitterness, raising the same long-standing conclusions and questions after a new war, the third war waged by the racist occupying State in five years against Gaza, this small, densely-populated and precious part of our country.
The difference today is that the scale of this genocidal crime is larger, and that the list of martyrs, especially children, is longer, as well as lists of the wounded and disabled, and that dozens of families have been completely decimated.
The difference today is that approximately half a million people were displaced from their homes, and that the number of homes, schools, hospitals, public buildings, residential buildings, mosques, factories and even cemeteries destroyed is unprecedented. And, the difference today is that the devastation caused by this recent aggression is unmatched in modern times, as confirmed by a witness, the honorable Commissioner-General of UNRWA.
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
This last war against Gaza was a series of absolute war crimes carried out before the eyes and ears of the entire world, moment by moment, in a manner that makes it inconceivable that anyone today can claim that they did not realize the magnitude and horror of the crime. And, it is inconceivable that some are unable to characterize this situation in real terms and that they suffice with simply declaring their support for Israel’s right to self-defense without regard for the fate of the thousands of victims of our people, ignoring a simple fact that we remind them of today: that the life of a Palestinian is as precious as the life of any other human being.
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Categories: Arab World, Asia, Palestine, United Nations