RAMALLAH, August 23, 2017 (WAFA) – United States and Israeli campaign to block the publication of a list of companies operating in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is morally repugnant, a PLO official said on Wednesday.

Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), denounced these efforts saying they constitute a flagrant obstruction of justice.

“The U.S. and Israeli campaign to silence the United Nations Human Rights Council as it exposes the complicity of Israeli and international businesses in Israel’s military occupation and the colonization of Palestinian land is morally repugnant.  This is a clear indication of Israel’s persistent impunity and sense of entitlement and privilege,” Ashrawi said in a statement.

“Such efforts constitute a flagrant obstruction of justice and willful defiance of the UNHRC resolution which was passed unanimously last year that called for the production of ‘a database of all business enterprises, both Israeli and international, involved in the activities in the settlements,’ that would be updated once a year,” she said.

The PLO official said that since “Israel’s illegal settlement policies and practices are unequivocally a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and in direct contravention of international law and conventions, including UNSC resolutions 446 (1979), 452 (1979), 465 (1980), and 2334 (2016), any company that chooses to do business in the illegal settlements becomes complicit in the crime and therefore liable to judicial accountability.”

“Suppressing the truth perpetuates Israeli impunity and gives Israel clear license to pursue its persistent policies of land theft and creeping annexation of Palestine,” she said.

“The recent campaign to whitewash the military occupation and to give Israel a free pass at the UN, as a well as conflating any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, enables the occupation and destroys the chances of peace.”

M.K.