The Cairo-based League of Arab States, comprising of 22 Arab countries, reiterated on Sunday its support to the Palestinian people’s struggle against the Israeli occupation and called for unveiling all Israeli practices that undermine the existence of Palestinians on their own homeland.
The league’s reiteration came in a statement, issued on Sunday, on the eve of Palestinian Land Day, which Palestinians continue to mark every year, since 1976.
The statement read that all Arab states, unanimously, stand by the Palestinian people in their quest for a just and durable peace, with the occupied city of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
In reference to Israel’s practices, including colonial settlements on occupied Palestinian territories, the statement pointed out that Israeli settlement activities are apparently meant to turn Palestinian territories into exclusively Jewish areas, thus Israel is breaching basic principles of international law and relevant United Nations resolutions.
A part of the league’s concern regarding the Palestinian territories is the occupation’s isolation of east Jerusalem by means of the Apartheid Wall and the protracted Israeli blockade, imposed on the Gaza Strip, since 2007.
Back in 1976, Israeli authorities in the Arab-Israeli town of Sakhneen and some other nearby areas, confiscated around 1500 acres of Palestinian-owned farmlands for colonial settlement purposes.
The confiscation sparked widespread protests, across Arab-Israeli towns. Israeli police dispersed the crowds by lethal force, claiming the lives of six Arab protesters.
Israeli colonial settlement activities were officially kicked off by Israel in the 1970s, as the Israeli occupation authorities in both Gaza and the West Bank, began erecting dozens of colonial settlements on Palestinian-owned lands. Today, Israeli colonial settlements have strangulated Palestinian-populated areas in the West Bank.
Back in 2005, Israel disengaged unilaterally from Gaza and evicted 17 such settlements, along the coastal Gaza Strip. Two years later, Israel imposed a crippling land, air and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip.
