Today the UN General Assembly resumed the 10th emergency special session on “Israeli actions in occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” There was a morning and afternoon session for discussion today; tomorrow morning, at 11:00 A.M., there will be a vote on the draft resolution, presented by Palestine, which demands an end of Israel’s “unlawful presence” in Gaza and the West Bank within one year, extended from an original time frame of six months. The text of the resolution can be read here.
Palestine submitted the draft resolution as a follow-up to the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. Palestine’s Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour told the 10th emergency session that “the Court’s advisory opinion showed that there is no doubt about the facts or the law. But the law is not there to merely serve as a measuring stick of violations. It is there to prevent those violations, and when that does not work, it is there to punish them, to bring them to a halt, to ensure accountability, to ensure justice. … It seeks action for accountability, the fundamental path for justice in any case, and Palestine cannot be the exception.”