Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the United Nations, addressed the UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East Situation on November 10, 2023.
“The General Assembly resolution must be implemented; the Security Council must echo its calls,” Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer of the observer State of Palestine said.
“Don’t let another day pass negotiating how many dozens trucks will enter; they need to enter every day by the hundreds and the thousands,” he said. “The voice of the humanitarian agencies needs to be heard, the screams of our people need to be heard and the bombs need to be silenced. Now, not later.”
Mounting death toll
Riyad Mansour said the shocking situation must be addressed, as the death toll mounts, recalling that the Council first meeting on the matter last month occurred when hundreds of Palestinians had been killed and today that number has reached 11,000, including 4,500 children.
“We meet and you can hear in these halls, if you listen well, the shouts of our children under the rubble abandoned by humanity,” he said. “We meet as only a few hundred trucks have entered Gaza in 30 days and 10 times more souls have left to the skies.”
The same suffering his generation faced is now tormenting young Palestinians today, he said.
“The killer never hid his intentions; he spoke of mighty vengeance and human animals and declared he would impose a terrifying siege,” he said. “He called for the release of 200 hostages while taking over two million hostages in the process.”
Constant bombardment
Israel continues to bomb Gaza, Mr. Mansour said.
“They want us out of our country, out of our land,” he said. “Their strategic enemy is the independence of our state, the freedom of our people. The only options they have ever given us: submit, leave or die. Or in international legal terms: apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide.”
Today, Israel is allowing enough trucks “to pretend it is not imposing the siege”, but not enough to save lives and is implementing “imaginary humanitarian pauses” whose only goal is to force people to flee and not to offer them some relief that their survival is guaranteed, he said.
“I used to come here to call for international protection from the constant assault against our people; now I come to address the survival of my people,” he said. “I used to come here to say protect my people from war crimes and crimes against humanity. Now I come to call for protection from genocide.”
If there are rules, then they must apply to Israel too and if there are rights, then the Palestinian people are entitled to them too, he said, adding that there should be “no double standards, no exception and no exceptionalism”.