The UNSC session was convened on Friday on the ongoing developments in the Middle East, including the situation in Palestine.
It was held a week after Israel attacked and burned Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza’s northern city of Beit Lahia and arrested its director Hussam Abu Safiya.
Asim Iftikhar, Alternate Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the UN, addressed the meeting, saying that the situation in Gaza is a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude.
Nowhere in the world has seen international law being trampled with such brazen impunity as in occupied Palestine by Israel, he added.
“Between October 2023 and June 2024, at least 136 strikes were carried out on 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities. Over 500 healthcare workers lost their lives.”
By June, 22 of Gaza’s 38 hospitals were rendered non-functional, leaving the healthcare system on the verge of collapse, the Pakistani envoy noted.
This is not a war, but a campaign of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and annihilation, Iftikhar said.
“The indiscriminate bombing of civilians and the systematic destruction of critical infrastructure are not isolated incidents. They are calculated acts aimed at erasing an entire people from their homeland.”
Meanwhile, Amar Bendjama, Permanent Representative of Algeria to the UN and the Security Council’s president for the month of January said that Israel's continued aggression against the Palestinians has a clear and worrying goal of ethnic cleansing, especially in northern Gaza.
The objective of the Israeli occupation is to destroy the resistance of the Palestinian people, he said, noting that “we must act together to end this disaster.”
The diplomat also called on the Security Council to call for an urgent, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
The Israeli regime launched its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after a retaliatory operation by Palestinian resistance fighters. The war has so far killed more than 45,600 people and injured over 108,500 others.
7129**4194
Your Comment