The United Nations special rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories warned this Saturday that Palestinians are at serious risk of suffering a new “massive ethnic cleansing”, greater than the flight after the creation of the State of Israel.
Francesca Albanese accuses both Hamas and the Israeli occupation forces of having committed “international crimes”, in a statement in which she places special emphasis on the number of victims on the Palestinian side since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, after the attempt. last Saturday to Israel by the militias of the Islamist movement.
And it denounces, in particular, “the death of more than 600 Palestinian children” and more than 423,000 displaced people “as a result of the Israeli attacks”, in a global balance that, to date, points to the death of more than 2,200 Palestinians and 1,300 Israelites dead.
In the last few hours, an Israeli ultimatum to the population of northern Gaza caused the flight of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of a region that has 1.1 million people, that is, half of the total population of the enclave, for fear of an imminent large-scale ground incursion by the Israeli army.
For all these reasons, “the current situation in the Palestinian Territories and Israel has reached a fever pitch,” he said in a statement, noting that “Israel has already committed massive ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians under the fog of war” and, “in the name of self-defense, trying to justify what would constitute another cleanup.”
As an independent expert of the UN Human Rights Council, Albanese calls on the UN and its Member States to “intensify efforts to mediate an immediate ceasefire between the parties” before the situation reaches a “point of no return.” “.
The official recalls that the Palestinian population has suffered “five large-scale wars since 2008”, a year after the declaration of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, which was “widely condemned by the international community as collective punishment.”
Palestinians have been left without shelter since Israel declared a complete siege of the small enclave a week ago, and the Rafah crossing with Egypt, the only border crossing that remains partially suspended, is blocked by shelling, according to Albanese.
The UN expert warns of the serious danger that the international community will witness a repetition of the Nakba of 1948 and the Naksa of 1967 (the so-called “retreat” of the Palestinian population after this year’s Arab-Israeli war), ” but on a larger scale.”
Therefore, “the international community must do everything in its power to prevent this from happening again”, since, at this moment, “any military operation that Israel decides to carry out will go far beyond the limits of the international right”.
Source: TSF
