Zahhar: No one can change the Palestinian refugees’ right to return

Gaza- Member of Hamas’s political bureau Mahmoud Al-Zahhar said that Israel’s attempts to end the UN classification of the Palestinian refugees would be doomed to failure because the sense of belonging to Palestine is deeply rooted in the hearts and minds of its generations.

“The Palestinian refugee is a citizen forcibly displaced from his land and his return is one of the constants that cannot be controlled by the occupation; it is sacred like our faith,” Zahhar stated in a press statement to the Palestinian information center (PIC).

“All the envoys in the universe cannot take away the sense of belonging from the hearts of the Palestinians or their right to their land and holy sites. Such attempts are bankrupt acts and reflect the Israeli occupation’s feeling that it is an alien entity having no future on our land,” the Hamas official stressed.

“Our grandfathers were once in their land and their grandchildren will return to it no matter how long it takes,” he underscored.

For its part, the Jordanian society for refugees warned Israel of its attempts to have the US and the UN to draft legislations meant to end the automatic transfer of refugee status to the descendants of Palestinian refugees.

“The Palestinian refugee status that applies to anyone who emigrated from Palestine as a result of the Israeli occupation as well as to their children and grandchildren as approved by the UN general assembly and adopted by the UNRWA since the time of the Nakba in 1948 cannot be manipulated or changed under any pretext,” the society stated on Monday.

“The two-state solution or any other political solution cannot be associated with the right of return because it is an independent, legal, political and humanitarian right individually and collectively, and no one, whoever he is, can change or waive it, not even the international organization (UN) itself.”

“Nobody in this universe has the right to deny any human the right to their land and country, unless he is subject to the logic of injustice, oppression and brute force,” the society emphasized.

Israeli envoy to the UN Ron Prosor had stated on Sunday that there were Israeli moves to urge the US and the UN to end the automatic transfer of refugee status to the descendants of the Palestinians who had been exposed to forced migration 65 years ago.

The Israeli newspaper Jerusalem Post quoted Prosor as saying that the UN classification of the Palestinian refugees was the principal stumbling block to a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian liberation organization (PLO).