Ex-Envoy Describes Palestine Most Important Unresolved Int’l Issue

Former Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon Qazanfar Roknabadi underlined that the Palestinian issue has been the most important international problem that has been left unresolved for over six decades now.
“The Palestinian issue will remain as the topmost issue of the Muslim community,” Roknabadi told reporters on Thursday.

He reiterated that Israel’s apartheid policies against the Palestinians as well as the promotion of religious extremism by the Israeli regime are some instances of the cause of insecurity in the region and the world.

In November, Iran’s Permanent Ambassador to the UN’s Vienna Offices Reza Najafi blasted the world body for inaction against Israel’s aggressions against the Palestinians in last 65 years.

“It is more than 65 years that the Palestine conflict has been lingering not only as an Islamic-Arabic issue, but turning throughout that long period into a complicated political and legal international dispute,” Najafi said on the anniversary of the International Solidarity Day with the Palestinian Nation.

He said that throughout all those long years the Palestinian people’s share had been nothing, but oppression, homelessness, getting killed, occupation of their homes, and due to the colonialist policies pursued by the Zionist regime, losing more and more of their rights in their motherlands that has got smaller and smaller every day.

“Only a few months have passed since the creation of another horrendous human catastrophe in Gaza by the blood thirsty war machine of the Zionist regime in which the defenseless Gaza residents, especially women, children and elderly Palestinians were massacred by that regime,” he reiterated.

Najafi once again repeated Iran’s proposal for resolving the Palestinian crisis, based on democratic ways aimed at harbingering a just and sustainable peace, ending the occupation in the entire Palestinian lands, and the homelessness of all Palestinian refugees.

He said that every citizen of Palestine, regardless of their religions, races, and ethnicities, should have the right to vote for their solid, independent Palestinian motherland whose capital city will be the Holy Quds (Jerusalem).

Israel rarely grants Palestinians permits to build in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It has demolished at least 27,000 Palestinian homes and structures since occupying the West Bank in 1967, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

Israel destroyed more than 663 Palestinian properties in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2013, displacing 1,101 people, according to UNOCHA. Some 250 people have been displaced since the beginning of 2014.

The internationally recognized Palestinian territories of which the West Bank and East Jerusalem form a part have been occupied by the Israeli military since 1967.

The UN General Assembly on December 2, 1997 issued a resolution naming November 29 as the International Solidarity Day with the Palestinian Nation.

The day is commemorated every year in UN New York Headquarters and the other UN offices around the globe, including Vienna.