The Palestinian ambassador to the UN, surrounded by his counterparts from Arab and Muslim countries, called on the United States on Thursday to stop Israel’s annexation of its territories.
‘I know that president Donald Trump is capable, and he has the tools to stop Netanyahu in his tracks, in order not to keep the whole region in turmoil...and to move in the direction of peace and justice, that is why the majority of us are working with them,’ Riyad Mansour told press.
‘We know that he told Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including recently, stop the nonsense in Lebanon, stop the craziness. You know you are not allowed to annex the land.’
The UN’s geopolitical bloc Arab Group joined the ambassador to express ‘deep alarm’ and regional solidarity against ‘rapidly escalating’ Israeli settler aggression and military violence against Palestinians.
‘Israel continues to implement policies that amount to accelerated annexation and a systematic dismantling of Palestinian rights,’ Saudi ambassador Abdulaziz Alwasil said on behalf of the bloc.
‘The Group stresses that Israel’s recent measures are not isolated incidents but part of a coordinated strategy to entrench permanent control over Palestinian land, alter the demographic and geographic reality on the ground, and eliminate the possibility of the independence of the State of Palestine, as a sovereign, viable and contiguous State, in accordance with the relevant UN resolutions.’
Others from the intergovernmental Organisation of Islamic Cooperation have echoed the demand to end Israel’s annexation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank, where settlement expansion continues, and in Gaza, where the Israeli army has taken control of at least half the territory.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces shot dead an 18-year-old Palestinian man in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said Friday, while the military said it had killed someone who threw firebombs at vehicles.
In the early hours of Friday, the health ministry said it had been informed of ‘the martyrdom of the young man Haitham Ezzedine Omar Hmeida, 18, by occupation gunfire in the village of Beitin,’ north east of Ramallah.
It added that the man’s body was being withheld.
In a statement, the Israeli military said its forces had ‘identified several terrorists throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli vehicles traveling on a major roadway’ near the village of Beitin.
‘The soldiers opened fire at the terrorists and eliminated one of them,’ the military said, adding that its forces were ‘currently pursuing the remaining suspects.’
Since the war in Gaza broke out in October 2023 with Hamas’s attack on Israel, near-daily violence has rocked the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.
Israeli soldiers or settlers have killed at least 1,078 Palestinians since then, including many militants, according to an AFP tally based on Palestinian health ministry data.
Official Israeli figures show at least 46 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military operations in the same period.
