PA writes to UN over settler violence

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has lodged a complaint with the United Nations over a recent wave of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians.

Palestinian delegate to the UN Riyad Mansour wrote a letter to the Security Council on Friday, calling for “urgent attention and serious action” to curb settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the Ma’an news agency reported.

In the letter, which was the 383rd such document submitted to the UN since 2000 over issues of occupation-related rights violations, Mansour said that the Security Council should consider the details of recent deadly settler attacks against Palestinians.

Mansour’s letter outlined the deaths of two Palestinian teens on Thursday and Friday and several other violent incidents as “brutal actions committed by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians and their properties.”

The letter complained about “settler terror, harassment and destruction unabated, on a daily basis, without fear of punishment or being brought to justice for their crimes against the Palestinian people.”

It also blamed Israeli forces occupying the area and guarding Tel Aviv’s illegal settlements of “actually enabling their crimes through the military and financial assistance and protection accorded to them [settlers].”

The PA delegate also criticized Israel’s unrelenting settlement construction on occupied Palestinian land, saying it posed “an existential threat to the two-state solution” and violated UN resolutions and previous accords between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.

The letter highlighted the deteriorating situation in regard to the settlements, noting that Israel’s approval of the construction of thousands of new settler units in the West Bank amounts to a “blatant, relentless colonization of the Palestinian land… in a deliberate and grave breach of the relevant provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

In addition, Arab nations have submitted a draft resolution to the UN seeking condemnation of Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank.