Palestine must not be marginalized on international agenda, UN Permanent Observer Riyad Mansour tells Arab News

Riyad Mansour
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Updated 22 September 2023
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Palestine must not be marginalized on international agenda, UN Permanent Observer Riyad Mansour tells Arab News

  • Amid violence in the West Bank, Mansour says Palestinians are turning to international courts to seek justice
  • Mansour says the international community is not yet bold enough to implement resolutions on Palestine

NEW YORK CITY: Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s permanent observer to the UN, outlined the key priorities and challenges facing the Palestinian cause in a wide-ranging interview with Arab News on the sidelines of the ongoing 78th session of the UN General Assembly. 

Mansour discussed Palestine’s efforts to update UN resolutions, navigate the International Court of Justice, address the crisis facing the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, and contend with escalating violence. 

He said “a ton of work” remains to be done, all geared toward having a political horizon and putting an end to Palestinian suffering at the hands of “those who keep telling us: ‘You just have to wait and wait and wait.’”

Mansour told Arab News: “The Palestinian people are fed up and frustrated and angry that they’ve been waiting for way too long, and the situation is moving from bad to worse.

“Something has to happen and a process needs to start that will end this occupation as quickly as possible and allow the Palestinian people to enjoy the independence of their own state, (based) on the June 4, 1967, borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.”




Mansour said the Palestinians were also appealing to the International Criminal Court to investigate possible crimes against humanity. (FILE/AFP)

Palestine’s top priority at this year’s General Assembly is to ensure UN resolutions related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are updated to reflect new realities and developments that have occurred over the past year. 

Mansour emphasized the importance of keeping the Palestinian issue on the international agenda, especially in light of what he called “the obsession with what is really happening in Ukraine.” 

He said: “In the atmosphere of Ukraine, (it is important) to remain relevant and (keep) your issue alive and on the table and to succeed in receiving more votes.”

He underscored the need to maintain and increase the number of votes in favor of Palestinian resolutions, as traditionally, Palestine has received overwhelming support from member states.

There are also efforts underway to push for the implementation of these resolutions, which as Mansour said, contain all the elements that would allow for a just and comprehensive solution to the conflict. 

“(When) there are sides that are shielding Israel from accountability and the consequences of getting away with not implementing (international) resolutions, then we look for additional ways of trying to maximize the pressure,” said Mansour. 

“One of these ways is seeking legal options.” 

The ICJ earlier this year had accepted a request from the UN for an advisory opinion on the legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the occupied territories. 

The opinion could potentially lead to accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinian people.

Mansour said the ICJ, the world’s top court, is a crucial avenue for pressuring the Israeli occupying authorities to comply with international law and UN resolutions. 




19-year-old Palestinian Qusai Jamal Maatan was shot by Israelis on Aug. 4. (FILE/AFP)

In August, the ICJ confirmed that 58 written statements from various countries have been filed in the court’s registry. 

Mansour said the Palestinians were also appealing to the International Criminal Court to investigate possible crimes against humanity.

“We are pushing the ICC to begin official investigations of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinian people,” he said, citing the “crime of settlement” and the “horrific aggression” of repeated incursions into Palestinian territory, such as in the Gaza Strip in 2014.  

Palestinians are also asking the ICC to “deal with the illegal policies and practices committed by Israel,” such as home demolition and annexation, Mansour said, referencing the proposed annexation of Area C, “which constitutes a significant portion of the land of the occupied West Bank.”

He added: “All these practices and policies (fall) under the title of annexation and Judaization of the occupied Palestinian territory. 

“And finally, as we (mentioned in) those questions that we asked (the ICJ), there was, during the last 20 years, (an) intensification of plans to put in place systems of discrimination. 

“We did not use the word of apartheid, but there is enough documentation and reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Al-Haq and others who have documented and argued in very sophisticated and convincing legal ways of the reality of apartheid that our people are living under.”

Lastly, Mansour said, Palestinians hope the court will determine what the legal consequences are for the Israeli occupation, “including the prolonged occupation itself, since occupations are supposed to be of a temporary nature and … many legal scholars consider it as being illegal because it moves from being temporary and to being annexation.”




The Israeli army demolished the house of Abdel Fatah Khroushah accused of an attack which killed two Israelis in the occupied West Bank at the end of February. (FILE/AFP)

Referring to the recent surge in violence, Mansour attributed the escalation to the Israeli government’s push for annexation and its implementation of plans in the occupied territories, particularly the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with extremist elements within the Israeli government advocating for the exclusion of Palestinians.

More than 200 Palestinians and nearly 30 Israelis have been killed so far this year in the occupied West Bank and Israel — a level of violence surpassing last year’s entire death toll and the highest number of fatalities since 2005, Tor Wennesland, the UN’s Middle East envoy, told the UN Security Council in August. 

Mansour said the current Israeli government is “in a hurry to expedite the process of annexation. They want to literally take most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and make it exclusively for the Jewish settlers.”

He added: “They are pushing the Palestinian people to the wall, and people are taking issues into their (own) hands in order to protect themselves, to protect their families and to fight against this plan of annihilation.”

One of the main issues discussed at the UN this week is the new, emerging multipolar world order, where, as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it, “power is diffuse,” and more and more countries are having a say in international matters. 

Despite the challenges posed by the world’s changing geopolitical dynamics, Mansour stressed the need to maintain the focus on Palestine’s plight to ensure that it is not marginalized.




In Palestine’s message to world leaders at the 78th UN General Assembly session, Mansour highlighted the immediate priorities of ending aggression, achieving financial stability, and gaining international recognition for the State of Palestine. (FILE/AFP)

He highlighted his efforts to keep the Palestine question prominent at the UN, including frequent discussions in the Security Council and successful resolutions related to Palestine, such as the “historic” resolution acknowledging the Nakba, and Palestinians’ engagement with the ICJ. 

“Many people thought that the Palestine question would be (brushed) under the rug,” said Mansour. “It’s our duty to expose the double standards and not allow our question to be the victim of the new realities.” 

While Israel “does not want the UN (to) even mention the question of Palestine,” Mansour said he was “delighted that to a great extent the international community does not accept this kind of behavior.”

However, he lamented that the international community “is not yet bold enough to say that we’ve adopted resolutions and they need to be implemented.”

He said: “If you don’t implement them, there will be consequences because it is required from all member states (to) honor and respect (the) principles enshrined in the (UN) Charter and the resolutions adopted by the Security Council and the General Assembly.”

In Palestine’s message to world leaders at the 78th UN General Assembly session, Mansour highlighted the immediate priorities of ending aggression, achieving financial stability, and gaining international recognition for the State of Palestine. 

He also stressed the need to “actualize the global consensus on the two-state solution to become a reality,” and for a collective political process that would lead “in a relatively short period of time” to the end of the occupation.


Iraq’s water reserves lowest in 80 years: official

Updated 25 May 2025
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Iraq’s water reserves lowest in 80 years: official

  • Iraqi spokesperson of the Water Resources Ministry Khaled Shamal says the country hasn't seen such a low reserve in 80 years
  • Iraq is considered by the United Nations to be one of the five most impacted countries by climate change

BAGHDAD: Iraq’s water reserves are at their lowest in 80 years after a dry rainy season, a government official said Sunday, as its share from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers shrinks.
Water is a major issue in the country of 46 million people undergoing a serious environmental crisis because of climate change, drought, rising temperatures and declining rainfall.
Authorities also blame upstream dams built in neighboring Iran and Turkiye for dramatically lowering the flow of the once-mighty Tigris and Euphrates, which have irrigated Iraq for millennia.
“The summer season should begin with at least 18 billion cubic meters... yet we only have about 10 billion cubic meters,” water resources ministry spokesperson Khaled Shamal told AFP.
“Last year our strategic reserves were better. It was double what we have now,” Shamal said.
“We haven’t seen such a low reserve in 80 years,” he added, saying this was mostly due to the reduced flow from the two rivers.
Iraq currently receives less than 40 percent of its share from the Tigris and Euphrates, according to Shamal.
He said sparse rainfall this winter and low water levels from melting snow has worsened the situation in Iraq, considered by the United Nations to be one of the five countries most vulnerable to some impacts of climate change.
Water shortages have forced many farmers in Iraq to abandon the land, and authorities have drastically reduced farming activity to ensure sufficient supplies of drinking water.
Agricultural planning in Iraq always depends on water, and this year it aims to preserve “green spaces and productive areas” amounting to more than 1.5 million Iraqi dunams (375,000 hectares), said Shamal.
Last year, authorities allowed farmers to cultivate 2.5 million dunams of corn, rice, and orchards, according to the water ministry.
Water has been a source of tension between Iraq and Turkiye, which has urged Baghdad to adopt efficient water management plans.
In 2024, Iraq and Turkiye signed a 10-year “framework agreement,” mostly to invest in projects to ensure better water resources management.


Israeli strikes kill 23 in Gaza, including a journalist and rescue service official

Updated 25 May 2025
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Israeli strikes kill 23 in Gaza, including a journalist and rescue service official

  • Israeli fire kills at least 23 people in Gaza
  • Israel controls 77 percent of Gaza Strip, Hamas media office says

CAIRO: Israeli military strikes killed at least 23 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Sunday, including a local journalist and a senior rescue service official, local health authorities said.
The latest deaths in the Israeli campaign resulted from separate Israeli strikes in Khan Younis in the south, Jabalia in the north and Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip, medics said.
In Jabalia, they said local journalist Hassan Majdi Abu Warda and several family members were killed by an airstrike that hit his house earlier on Sunday.
Another airstrike in Nuseirat killed Ashraf Abu Nar, a senior official in the territory’s civil emergency service, and his wife in their house, medics added.
There was no immediate comment by the Israeli military.
The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said that Abu Warda’s death raised the number of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 220.
In a separate statement, the media office said Israeli forces were in control of 77 percent of the Gaza Strip, either through ground forces or evacuation orders and bombardment that keeps residents away from their homes.
The armed wing of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said in separate statements on Sunday that fighters carried out several ambushes and attacks using bombs and anti-tank rockets against Israeli forces operating in several areas across Gaza.
On Friday the Israeli military said it had conducted more strikes in Gaza overnight, hitting 75 targets including weapons storage facilities and rocket launchers.
Israel launched an air and ground war in Gaza after Hamas militants’ cross-border attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people by Israeli tallies with 251 hostages abducted into Gaza.
The conflict has killed more than 53,900 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, and devastated the coastal strip. Aid groups say signs of severe malnutrition are widespread.


Israeli military says it intercepted missile from Yemen

Updated 25 May 2025
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Israeli military says it intercepted missile from Yemen

  • Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have continued to fire missiles at Israel in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza

CAIRO: The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen toward Israel.
Sirens sounded in several areas in the country, the Israeli military said earlier.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have continued to fire missiles at Israel in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Most of the group’s missile have been intercepted or have fallen short.
The Houthis did not immediately comment on the latest missile launch.


Syria to help locate missing Americans

Updated 25 May 2025
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Syria to help locate missing Americans

DAMASCUS: Syria’s new authorities have agreed to help the United States locate and return Americans who went missing in the war-torn country, a US envoy said on Sunday.
“The new Syrian government has agreed to assist the USA in locating and returning USA citizens or their remains. The families of Austin Tice, Majd Kamalmaz, and Kayla Mueller must have closure,” US special envoy for Syria Tom Barrack wrote on X.


Turkiye, PKK must both change for peace: former militant

Updated 25 May 2025
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Turkiye, PKK must both change for peace: former militant

  • For years, Yuksel Genc was a fighter with the Kurdish rebel group
  • Genc herself joined the militants in 1995 when she was a 20-year-old university student in Istanbul

DIYARBAKIR, Turkiye: “When you try and explain peace to people, there is a very serious lack of trust,” said Yuksel Genc, a former fighter with the PKK, which recently ended its decades-long armed struggle against the Turkish state.
Talking over a glass of tea in a square in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in Turkiye’s Kurdish-dominated southeast, this 50-year-old former fighter with long auburn curls is worried about how the nascent rapprochement between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) will play out.
“The guerillas are sincere, but they don’t think the state is,” said Genc, her words briefly interrupted by the roar of a fighter jet flying overhead.
“They think the government does not trust them.”
For years, she was a fighter with the Kurdish rebel group, which on May 12 said it would disarm and disband, ending a four-decade armed struggle against the Turkish state that cost more than 40,000 lives.
The historic move came in response to an appeal by its jailed founder Abdullah Ocalan, arrested in 1999 and serving life in solitary ever since on a prison island near Istanbul.
Genc herself joined the militants in 1995 when she was a 20-year-old university student in Istanbul.
“At that time, many Kurdish villages were being burnt down, and we were constantly hearing about villages being evacuated, people being displaced and unsolved murders,” she said.
She described it as “a time of terrible repression.”
“You felt trapped, as if there was no other way than to join the guerrillas,” she said.
Four years later, after years in exile, Ocalan was snatched by Turkish commandos in a Hollywood-style operation in Nairobi.
“Ocalan’s capture provoked a deep sense of rage among the guerrillas, who feared it would mean the Kurdish cause would be destroyed,” she said.
But it was Ocalan himself who called for calm and insisted it was time for the Kurdish question to be resolved democratically. He urged his followers to go to Turkiye, hand over their weapons and seek dialogue.
“He thought our arrival would symbolize (the PKK’s) goodwill, and persuade the state to negotiate.”
Genc was part of the first so-called “groups for peace and a democratic solution” — a group of three women and five men who arrived in Turkiye on October 1, 1999 on what they knew would be a “sacrificial” mission.
After a long march through the mountains, they arrived in the southeastern village of Semdinli under the watchful eye of “thousands” of Turkish soldiers huddled behind rocks.
Handing over their weapons, they were transferred to the city of Van 200 kilometers (140 miles) to the north where they were arrested.
Genc spent the next nearly six years behind bars.
“For us, these peace groups were a mission,” she said. “The solution had to come through dialogue.”
After getting out, she continued to struggle for Kurdish rights, swapping her gun for a pen to become a journalist and researcher for the Sosyo Politik think tank.
Even so, her writing earned her another three-and-a-half years behind bars.
“Working for peace in Turkiye has a cost,” she said with a shrug.
When Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister in 2003, there was hope for a new breakthrough. But several attempts to reach an agreement went nowhere — until now.
“Like in 1999, the PKK is moving toward a non-violent struggle,” she said.
“But laying down arms is not the end of the story. It is preparing to become a political organization.”
Resolving the decades-long conflict requires a change on both sides however, said Genc.
“It essentially involves a mutual transformation,” she argued.
“It is impossible for the state to stick with its old ways without transforming, while trying to resolve a problem as old and divisive as the Kurdish question.”
Despite the recent opening, Genc does not speak of hope.
“Life has taught us to be realistic: years of experience have generated an ocean of insecurity,” she said.
“(PKK fighters) have shown their courage by saying they will lay down their weapons without being defeated. But they haven’t seen any concrete results.”
So far, the government, which initiated the process last autumn, has not taken any steps nor made any promises, she pointed out.
“Why haven’t the sick prisoners been released? And those who have served their sentences — why aren’t they benefiting from the climate of peace?“
And Ocalan, she said, was still being held in solitary despite promises of a change in his situation.
The number of people jailed for being PKK members or close to the group has never been revealed by the Turkish authorities.
“The fact that Ocalan is still not in a position to be able to lead this process toward a democratic solution is a major drawback from the militants’ point of view,” she said.
“Even our daily life remains totally shaped by security constraints across the region with the presence of the army, the roadblocks — all that has to change.”