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U.N. Security Council Begins Debate on Middle East Crisis
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 20 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The U.N. Security Council on Monday began its first open debate in almost five months on the bloodshed in the Middle East, called despite Israel's objection to what it called the "internationalization" of the crisis.
A total of 43 speakers were scheduled to take part in the debate, including the Palestinian observer to the United Nations, Nasser al-Kidwa, and the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., Yehuda Lancry, who were to speak first and second, respectively.
The debate was the first public session of the council on the crisis since March 27th, when the United States vetoed a resolution to send international observers to the Palestinian territories.
"Since then, the situation has continued to deteriorate," Al-Kidwa said.
"It is difficult to believe and impossible to justify the fact that the Security Council has taken no action" since the start of the Palestinian uprising on September 28th last year, he said.
"During this period, the Israeli occupying forces have killed 572 Palestinians, many of them children," Al-Kidwa said. Thousands of Palestinians had been wounded, and some of those permanently disabled, he added.
There was "something fundamentally wrong" in the workings of the Security Council, which threatened to undermine the credibility and the effectiveness of the U.N. itself, Al-Kidwa said.
In Jerusalem, Palestinian sources said six Palestinians were killed and at least 12 others injured by Israeli fire in separate incidents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Sunday.
Israel denied responsibility for one incident in which a father and his two children died.
Around 2,000 people attended Monday's funeral of a Palestinian man and his two young children who died in a Gaza Strip explosion that Israel and the Palestinians both blamed upon one other, as Israeli troops severely beat a Palestinian man at a border checkpoint.
Palestinians were outraged at the deaths of 32-year-old activist Samir Abu El Az, a member of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, his six-year-old daughter Alaa, and five-year-old son Suleiman.
A Palestinian security spokesman dismissed Israeli claims that Abu El Az had been blown up by a bomb intended for Israeli targets.
"We found debris from an Israeli anti-tank missile in the ruins of the house. We have no doubt that this was an Israeli operation to liquidate a member of Fatah," he said.
Israel has targeted more than 40 Palestinian activists in assassination attacks condemned by the international community, including the U.S., but defended by the Jewish state as "active self-defense."
Nine other people were injured in the explosion.
"They were accidentally killed by a bomb that was intended for use against Israel," an Israeli military source told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"Palestinian claims that we fired a tank shell or a missile at a Palestinian home are completely untrue. They are part of the Palestinian Authority's campaign to incite violence against Israel," the Israeli army said in a statement.
On Monday, Palestinian witnesses and medical workers reported that Israeli border police at a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem severely beat a Palestinian man trying to enter Israel in order to work. Palestinians have been denied access to work in Israel under debilitating sanctions the Jewish state has imposed in the recent months.
Witnesses said that as construction worker Jamil Ali Al Shahir, 30, was trying to cross through fields near the checkpoint with a group of other men, Israeli border police grabbed him by his hair and smashed his head against a rock, breaking his jaw.
Shahir, who is from the Bethlehem area, also suffered bleeding in his ear, medical officials said, adding he was later transferred to Jerusalem.
Israel police shot dead another Palestinian man as he tried to skirt a checkpoint near Nablus on Sunday, in an incident that also injured three other men. They had apparently tried to go around the checkpoint after facing long delays imposed by Israeli checkpoint guards, which have also included forcing Palestinians to remain in closed cars, with nor air-conditioning and closed windows, in unbearable heat.
Also on Monday, Israeli bulldozers destroyed two Palestinian apartment blocks and a nursery school in Occupied East Jerusalem, which Israeli authorities claim had been built without planning permission.
Around 30 troops sealed off the area in the Beit Hanina neighborhood as bulldozers leveled two four-story buildings and the school, which were still under construction, an AFP reporter on the scene said.
The owner of the complex, Ibrahim Jolani, said the property had been worth $250,000.
He said Israeli authorities put the demolition order on a door of one building overnight so he would not see it, adding that the bulldozers arrived early the next morning.
"It's common for them to put up the notice somewhere they won't see it," said Rabbi Arik Asherman of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions.
Prominent Israeli Arab deputy, Ahmed Tibi, said the demolitions would lead to more animosity among Palestinians and Israelis.
"They came like thieves in the night instead of allowing the owner to appeal to a court," said Tibi, a former advisor to Arafat.
"When Israelis ask themselves why suicide bombers attack them, images of demolished houses and killings and roadblocks are out there," he said.
"Theirs is a policy of strangulation ... in order to push Palestinians out of East Jerusalem."
Israel and the Palestinians both lay claim to East Jerusalem. Israeli troops occupied it in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in a move not recognized by the international community.
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