Middle East: Israeli Settlement Expansion and Escalation - Briefing | United Nations

Security Council briefing by Ramiz Alakbarov, Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator, on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question. The United Nations Security Council met to receive briefings on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a senior UN official reporting that Israeli planning authorities had advanced or approved over 6,000 housing units in occupied Palestinian territory during the reporting period. “Security Council resolution 2334 (2016) calls on Israel to ‘immediately and completely cease all settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,’” Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN's Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process said to the Security Council. “Settlement activity has, nevertheless, continued at high levels,” he added. Alakbarov told the Council that Israeli authorities had demolished, seized or forced people to demolish 429 structures in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, displacing 575 persons, including 290 children and 150 women. He said 28 of the structures were donor funded. He added that on Jan 4, Israeli police forcibly evicted two Palestinian families from their apartments in the Batn Al Hawa area of Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem, displacing eight people. Alakbarov also said Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad had continued to praise terror attacks and call for additional violence against Israelis, while Israeli ministers and members of the Knesset had continued to call for re-establishment of settlements in Gaza, annexation of the West Bank and the “emigration” of Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territory.


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