PA said aiming to have UN General Assembly outlaw Israel’s presence in West Bank, East Jerusalem

The Palestinian Authority is working to secure a General Assembly resolution outlawing Israel’s presence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel’s Channel 12 news reports.

It says the PA will ask the GA, when the UN body convenes in New York next month, to adopt last month’s International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s 56-year-long rule in “the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967” is “illegal,” and that it is obligated to bring its presence in that territory to an end “as rapidly as possible.”

The ICJ in The Hague is the UN’s top court. Its July 19 decision was non-binding. General Assembly resolutions are also non-binding, but in this case it could potentially snowball and lead to pressure for arms embargoes and the blacklisting of settlements, the TV report says.

In its July decision, the ICJ said it determined Israel’s policy of settlement in the West Bank violates international law, and that Israel had effectively annexed large parts of the West Bank — along with East Jerusalem, which was formally annexed and designated as sovereign Israeli territory in 1980 — due to some of the apparently permanent aspects of Israeli rule there.

The legal consequences of its findings, the court ruled, were that Israel must end its control of these areas, cease new settlement activity, “repeal all legislation and measures creating or maintaining the unlawful situation” — including those which it said “discriminate against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” — and provide reparations for any damage caused by its “wrongful acts.”

In addition, the court said that all UN member states are obligated not to recognize changes to the status of the territory, and that all states are obligated not to aid or assist Israel’s rule of the territories, and ensure that any impediment “to the exercise of the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination is brought to an end.”

The TV report says Israel is aware of the PA effort, and has a month to try to thwart it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, numerous cabinet ministers as well as settler leaders roundly denounced the ICJ’s July ruling, with some calling for the immediate formal annexation of the West Bank in response.

“The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land — not in our eternal capital Jerusalem, not in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria,” Netanyahu said at the time, using the biblical names for the West Bank. “No false decision in The Hague will distort this historical truth, just as the legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland cannot be contested.”