RAMALLAH, Friday, March 22, 2019 (WAFA) – Secretary-General of the PLO’s Executive Committee Saeb Erekat slammed US Secretary of State Mark Pompeo’s visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem as part of the United States’ flagrant violations of international law.

Erekat affirmed that the US administration’s announcement on Syria’s Golan Heights coupled with its unilateral decisions recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, legitimizing illegal Israeli settlements and dropping the two-state solution are intended to “make a fundamental change in the US policies towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict”.

He also affirmed that these decisions constitute “flagrant violations of international law and the United Nations’ resolutions.”

He pointed out that the visit of US Secretary of State Mark Pompeo accompanied by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Al-Buraq Wall, also known as the Western Wall, is part of these violations.

The chief Palestinian negotiator stressed that Israel has transformed its colonial-settlement enterprise into an apartheid system in the full sense of the term through imposing collective punishment on the Palestinian people, transforming Palestinian cities, towns and camps into ghettos that are governed by Israeli racist laws and military orders, plundering Palestinian land and natural resources, and forcing Palestinian landowners to work in slavery-like conditions in their stolen lands.

He called upon the international community to stop the collapse of international laws, conventions and norms which threatens to transform the world into battlegrounds of religious, sectarian and ethnic conflicts.

Erekat made his remarks during separate meetings with an International Labour Organization’s delegation, a delegation of students from Colombia and Harvard Universities, and Ireland’s Representative to the Palestinian Authority Jonathan Conlon.

K.F.