Israel seeks to seize more Palestinian land: Academic

Press TV has conducted an interview with Hani al-Bassous, a professor of political science at the Islamic University of Gaza, about a Palestinian rights organization detailing Israeli rights violations against Palestinians, saying that Israeli forces killed at least seven Palestinians and kidnapped another 316 in the month of July.

 The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: At this point we are looking at these numbers that have come out and of course it does point to a very alarming trend and the fact that it has increased when it comes to the tensions and the killings but this has been going on week in, week out, month in, month out for a very long time. Why doesn’t this get highlighted more in order for the world to know what Israel is doing in occupied territories?

Bassous: Well this is a fact that the Israeli policy has been perpetuating the fact that they abduct more Palestinians and they escalate their own attacks against the Palestinian people in the West Bank but the media at the international level not reflect much of the Palestinian situation.

I think this is giving an indication that the international media does not care about the Palestinian situation and giving an implicit acceptance of what is going on in Palestine. We understand the fact that there have been many issues in the region - in Yemen, in Egypt, in Tunisia and Libya and so on and so forth but let not forget the Palestinian situation is one of the most important situations and cases in the world.

We understand the fact that the Israeli occupation has been for more than six decades in Palestine. So this is an issue in which the international community has to understand that the only people have been left under occupation are the Palestinian people. So the Israeli policy has been escalating its own aggression, its own attack against the Palestinian people in the West Bank. This is to build more settlements, to expropriate Palestinian land and to perpetuate the fact that Jerusalem al-Quds is becoming a Jewish city. This is what they are planning to do and this is what is happening from the past many weeks and many months.

As you mentioned at the beginning of this report, the last month has witnessed six Palestinian martyrs, six Palestinian people were killed, more than 300 Palestinians were abducted - some of them women, some of them children - and we have seen the silence of the international community especially we have witnessed such escalation for the past three days and the case of the killing of the child who was only 18 months old. This case has reflected some condemnation by the international community but if you look at the media, the international media does not talk much about the Palestinian case. This kind of negligence is meant to give the upper hand to the Israeli occupation forces to kill more Palestinians and this is not logic. This is [an] immoral situation. 

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