RAMALLAH, April 21, 2018 (WAFA) - The US State Department’s dropping the term “occupied territories” from its annual human rights report released on Friday when making reference to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza makes it complicit to the internationally condemned and illegal Israeli occupation, Ahmad Majdalani, member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), said on Saturday.
US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a staunch supporter of Israel’s illegal settlement policy in the occupied territories, has asked the State Department in December to stop referring to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights as “occupied territories,” which it did in its most recent report on human rights in Israel and the occupied territories.
Majdalani accused the State Department of “attempting to abolish the depiction of occupation from these territories, which affirms US complicity with the occupation.”
He said in a statement that all the steps recently taken by the administration of US President Donald Trump with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict “make it an accomplice to the occupation and discredit it and its team for the political process.”
Majdalani said the US State Department “wants to beautify the image of the occupation through its international reports, but the whole world is well aware of the horrors of this occupation and its crimes and systematic state terrorism against our people.”
He gave the Israeli army’s execution of unarmed Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip over the past three weeks as an example of the Israeli crimes, calling for the formation of an international commission of inquiry to hold the occupation accountable for its crimes and to provide international protection for the unarmed Palestinian people.
"If the current situation continues without international intervention to break the US hegemony on the political process, we will not get any results, and the Trump administration will hold full responsibility for any explosion that may engulf the region as a whole," said the PLO official.
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