Foreign Minister Riyad Malki strongly criticized the US labeling of Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem as “Arab residents,” charging the United States of adopting the terms used by the extremist right-wing government in Israel.
Adopting this term, he said, “disregards all international and United Nations reports issued by independent investigation and fact-finding committees, including the findings of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court that Israel, its occupation army and its officials violate international law, and commit war crimes, targeting and killing Palestinian civilians deliberately.”
Malki expressed his strong rejection and condemnation of what he said in a statement as “attempts to falsify and deny the facts,” asserting that “the Palestinian people are the owners of this land for tens of thousands of years, and that they are rooted in it and continue to remain in their land in historical Palestine, and therefore any attempt to label them as residents when they are the indigenous people of Palestine and Jerusalem is unacceptable.”
He said that “the Israeli occupation has no right to claim sovereignty over the land that it occupies, and that with the US encouraging the occupation will not change the legal status of the occupied Palestinian land, including Jerusalem, and therefore the place of this report and the so-called deal of the century is the trash pin of history.”
