Pakistan Renews Its Full Support To Palestinian People At Commemoration Of Nakba Anniversary

UNITED NATIONS, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 18th May, 2024) Pakistan re-affirmed its "deepest" solidarity with the Palestinian people at a special event held at UN Headquarters in New York on Friday to commemorate the anniversary of the Nakba.

"We empathize with profound pain of displacement and oppression they (Palestinians) endure," Ambassador Usman Jadoon, deputy permanent representative of Pakistan to the United Nations, told the event organized by the UN Palestinian Rights Committee at UN Headquarters in New York.

This year marks the 76th anniversary of the mass displacement of Palestinians, known as “the Nakba” or “the Catastrophe”. This anniversary puts the spotlight on the world’s longest-standing protracted refugee crisis, as over 5.3 million Palestine refugees still live amidst conflict.

In his opening remarks, Senegalese Ambassador Cheikh Niang, who is the chairman of the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, said, "The Nakba of 1948 and today’s Nakba in Gaza are not two separate events,"

“Today, we again commemorate the events of 1948 and subsequent years, which led to the dispossession and displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral lands,” said Ambassador Niang as he opened a panel discussion titled “1948-2024: The Ongoing Palestinian Nakba”.

Between 1948 and 2024, Israel continued its illegal actions, he said. “The Nakba, thus, is an ongoing process affecting the Palestinian people over generations.”

Ambassador Jadoon, the Pakistani envoy, strongly condemned Israel for its brutal war in Gaza, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has described as a “plausible genocide.”

"Over the past 7 decades," he said, "the Palestinian people have not only been denied the right to self-determination, where millions of them have been expelled from their homeland, but they have also been subjected to a prolonged and brutal foreign occupation for the past 57 years.

"Pakistan reiterates its call for an immediate, unconditional and sustainable ceasefire in Gaza; unrestricted humanitarian supplies and holding Israel accountable for its crimes.

The Pakistani envoy added, "We reaffirm our solidarity with the people of Palestine and call for the establishment of a viable, independent and contiguous State of Palestine on the basis of internationally agreed parameters of the pre-1967 borders, with Al Quds al Sharif as its capital."

Also addressing the event was Palestine's Ambassador Riyad Mansour, who said that “the Nakba encompasses both a personal tragedy for every Palestinian family and a collective deed” — in which most of an entire nation was uprooted overnight from its ancestral land while the rest were treated like strangers in their own country.

“The Nakba is an enterprise of displacement and replacement of people that continues to this very day,” he observed, adding that it took 75 years for the UN to recognize and commemorate it.

Today, the people in Gaza are besieged, bombed and starved with the aim of their destruction or removal, he said. The Israeli Government no longer hides its true intentions of “a second Nakba”, leaving the Palestinians with three options: displacement, subjugation, or deaths — in other words, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or genocide, the Palestinian envoy warned.

However, there is now universal recognition of the Palestinian people, and soon, it will be matched by universal recognition of the Palestinian State, Ambassador Mansour said. There is a global consensus to end the Israeli occupation, fulfil Palestinian rights, and have two States — Palestine and Israel — living side by side.

“It is time for accountability and justice so freedom and peace can be achieved,” he declared, commending the brave students from the United States and all corners of the globe who give voice to the Palestinian cause.

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