By Vestnik Kavkaza
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that on April 1 Palestine will become a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC). ICC Prosecutor General Fatou Bensouda has initiated a preliminary investigation into the statements of the Palestinian administration about war crimes committed by Israel on its territory. Not only Israel, but also Washington voiced its concerns about the actions of the ICC. On January 26 Brussels will host a meeting of the four Middle East mediators (Russia, US, EU and UN). The UN Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs, Jens Toyberg Frandzen, I noted that the chances of the "resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians are becoming slimmer and slimmer."
In fact, the year 2014 was marked by the most significant escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the past years. In the course of 50 days of hostilities, 2200 Palestinians were killed and 10,000 wounded. The Palestinian side has sustained losses worth $5 billion. However the Palestinian Ambassador to Moscow, Fayed Mustafa, believes that in the last year Palestine has achieved success in some very important questions. "It's the end of the split in the Palestinian ranks and reconciliation. Of course, this process is not yet fully completed as we would want, I mean the process of full reconciliation. But in any case, we can say that we have passed from the stage when we had two governments - in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, to the best of the situation. Now we have one government, a government of national consensus, and we hope that it will continue to successfully operate in order to completely put an end to the controversy and the schism that we had," he said.
The ambassador stressed that the "Israeli colonization" of Palestinian lands is the main problem at the moment. "the arrests of Palestinians have continued in the past year. Now the number of our prisoners and jailed in Israeli prisons exceeds 8000 people. As for the number of colonizers, it increased by 4% and now it is 650 thousand. Settlers live in 184 settlements, which were illegally established, in contradiction of the laws of the Palestinian territories, as well as 138 villages and centers of settlement activity and 93 houses were captured directly in cities or other localities in Palestinian territory. These are some numbers, statistics, which tell about the results of 2014, and you can see how difficult this year was, how difficult it was for the Palestinian people," the ambassador said.
