International

While highly placed officials in Jerusalem were attending the opening yesterday of the American embassy in the city, the Israeli army was inflicting a bloodbath on the people of the Gaza Strip. According to the latest information, 58 people have been killed and 2,700 wounded, all of them on the Palestinian side.

Human rights organisations have condemned the Israeli actions. Amnesty International has stated in plain language that excessive violence has been used. Snipers shooting down unarmed demonstrators is outrageous. Everything points, in the opinion of human rights groups, to the fact that war crimes have been committed.

This was not the first time that Israel has ignored international law and and sowed terror among the Palestinians. In just six weeks in the Gaza Strip more than a hundred people have died and some twelve thousand have been wounded.

SP parliamentary spokeswoman on foreign policy Sadet Karabulut is urging the international community to condemn the violence and impose sanctions against Israel. “If that doesn't happen,” she says, “Israel will once again find no obstacle placed in its way to prevent it committing further atrocities.”

Later today the UN Security Council, on which the Netherlands is currently – for a term of one year – seated, is meeting to discuss the violence in the Gaza Strip. “Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok must seize this opportunity to condemn the disproportionate Israeli violence in no uncertain terms and to call on the international community to impose an arms embargo on Israel,” says Karabulut. “Here in the Netherlands the Israeli ambassador should be summoned for a dialogue in which words must not be minced.”
 
Today Israel celebrates its seventieth anniversary. For the Palestinians, this is a day of remembrance of the Nakba, the catastrophe, not something which they wish to celebrate at all. Their country has throughout these seven decades been occupied, an occupation which has been linked to human rights abuses and war crimes. Only when the occupation and the enlargement of illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories come to an end will there be any prospect of peace. Every effort should be directed towards this.