Syria: Israel refuses to yield to int'l law, making use of support offered by some states

By ARIEL BEN SOLOMON
Dans le Golan israélien, la force des Nations unies chargée d’observer le désengagement (UNDOF) s’apprête à passer en Syrie, le 31 août dernier (photo credit: BAZ RATNER)
Dans le Golan israélien, la force des Nations unies chargée d’observer le désengagement (UNDOF) s’apprête à passer en Syrie, le 31 août dernier
(photo credit: BAZ RATNER)
The UN has consistently called on Israel to end its presence on the “Syrian Golan Heights and Palestinian lands” taken in the 1967 war, but Israel “recklessly” disregards it, Syria’s permanent envoy to the UN in Geneva, Ambassador Hussam al-Din Ala, said this week.
“Israel makes use of the support offered by a number of UN member states, therefore, it goes on in perpetrating violations of the human rights in the occupied Arab lands,” Ala claimed at the United Nations Human Rights Council in the Swiss city on Monday, as quoted by the Syrian Arab News Agency – SANA.
Israel refuses “to yield to international human law as it still violates the simplest human rights, starting from the right of life, education, work and health, reaching to the right of sovereignty on natural resources,” he said.
The Syrian diplomat accused Israel of “greedy ambition” that motivated it to facilitate the flow of terrorists, including from the Nusra Front, into the border area on the Golan Heights, which led to the attacks on Fijian and Filipino peacekeepers there.
Earlier this month, Syria’s Ambassador to the UN Bashar Jaafari made similar accusations against Israel, claiming it wants peacekeepers removed from the Golan Heights so it can act without international oversight.
“Israel is the most interested in having peacekeepers evacuated from the occupied Golan so as to be left without international monitoring,” Jaafari told reporters, according to SANA.
Jaafari claimed that Israel, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia seek to encourage “armed terrorist organizations to enter the disengagement area with the aim of creating a buffer zone similar to that created by Israel and its agents in South Lebanon, which was liberated by the [Lebanese] resistance in 2000.”
Jaafari said he gave UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon evidence of involvement by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan in supporting the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front and other Islamist opposition groups in Syria. The evidence included information on a Qatari officer who was “coordinating the kidnapping” of UN peacekeepers from Fiji, he claimed.