Politics

Israeli West Bank Settlements “Greatest Threat” to Peace, EU Report Finds

e1-settlementThe continued illegal Zionist state’s building program on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank is the single greatest threat to any peaceful solution of the Middle East crisis, newly-leaked details of an European Union report has stated.

The report, meant to be confidential, highlighted what it labelled as the ”most significant and problematic” settlement plans in East Jerusalem, including plans to construct the settlement known as E1(announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in response to the United Nations vote to upgrade Palestine to a ”non-member observer state” last November).

”The construction of these … settlements is part of a political strategy aimed at making it impossible for Jerusalem to become the capital of two states,” the report reads.

The report, written by EU Commissioners in the region, recommended economic sanctions against Israeli settlements, and  scathing report from European Union consulates accuses Israel of illegally annexing East Jerusalem and ”systematically undermining Palestinian presence” in the city.

It found settlement construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank was ”the biggest single threat to the two-state solution”.

Israel was trying to drive Palestinians out of East Jerusalem with restrictive zoning and planning, demolitions and evacuations, discriminatory access to religious sites, an inequitable education policy, difficult access to healthcare and inadequate provision of resources, the report said.

The EU Heads of Mission Jerusalem Report says every effort must be made to ensure products manufactured in settlements do not receive preferential treatment or tariffs and that they are correctly labelled as settlement goods.

Israel captured East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War. It subsequently annexed the area in a move that has never been recognised by the international community.

Palestinian diplomats in Brussels welcomed the report’s conclusions. Hadi Chebli of the Palestinian delegation to the EU said: “This time it is true that the EU has really begun to take note of the report’s recommendations.”

The International Court of Justice has also said the settlements are illegal, but none of this has had any effect on the Zionist Supremacists who continue as before, safe in the knowledge that their lobbies in the media, the government and high finance in the occupied states of Europe and America will continue to protect them.