Ashrawi: It's time to turn to security council to stop Israeli breaches

A senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) said on Saturday that the time has come for the Palestinians to turn to the United Nations Security Council after Israel's housing ministry issued tenders for building 1,400 new housing units in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. Hanan Ashrawi, member of the PLO Executive Committee, said in a press release, a copy of which was obtained by Petra, that the acceleration of the dangerous Israeli violations by intensifying the settlement activity was a clear message to Washington and the world community of Israel's final rejection of any attempt at peace and to lay to rest the two-state solution. She said Israel had turned U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's efforts into "a farce." The Palestinian legislator said the United States seemed to have absorbed Israeli violations and humiliations at a time Washington was trying to put more pressure on the Palestinian side through accusations of unilateralism in its legitimate and legal right to resort to the U.N. "It is high time to head to the Security Council to lodge a protest against Israel, the occupying power, and its systematic unilateral violations against our people and their resources, foremost of which is the theft of its land, expansion of settlements, judaisation of Jerusalem and its surroundings, all of which breached international rules," she said. The Palestinian legislator said the Security Council must take a clear and candid decision on those violations, hold Israel to account and curb such assaults. The current circumstances, she said, did not tolerate giving Israel more time to undermine the peace prospects and the issue should be litigated and the atrocities it committed and its defiance of the international community must be answered. She said the Palestinian leadership had the political and legal right to respond to Israel "before the situation explodes," adding that in the absence of an Israeli peace partner, and replacing it with an extremist coalition that hinders the entire political process, it was inevitable that the Palestinians "opt for legal and international options that protect our rights."