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Follow Us on TwitterFalk says settlements ‘almost insurmountable’ obstacle to statehood 22Oct10 October 24, 2010
Ma’an News Agency - 22 October 2010
Israel’s settlement construction in the occupied territories has become an almost insurmountable obstacle to creating an independent Palestinian state, a UN envoy was quoted as saying Friday.
A Palestinian state “seems increasingly problematic as a solution because it would require a substantial reversal of the settlement process,” said Richard Falk, a UN representative on human rights in the Palestinian territories
He told a news conference at the UN headquarters that the settlers would probably put up strong opposition to any such move, Agence France-Presse reported.
Falk added that “the extension of the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem by way of unlawful settlements, house demolitions, revocations of Palestinian residence rights, makes it increasingly difficult to envisage a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem.”
“You have to disconnect between an inter-governmental peace process and an illusion that at the end of this process is an independent sovereign Palestinian state,” the envoy, a professor of international law at Princeton University in the United States, told reporters.
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