October 28, 2007

NEW YORK, (PIC)-- Jean Ziegler, the UN special rapporteur on right to food, castigated the Israeli occupation and described it as the only "colonial regime" which refuses to abide by any international law, calling on the UN to adopt an effective policy forcing Israel to respect human rights and the Geneva Convention.

"The Israeli occupation is a colonial regime and an illegal military occupation from the UN's point of view, it continues to annex more Palestinian lands; and thus the Israeli occupation is the worst in the history of colonialism," Ziegler stated in a TV interview.

The UN official underlined that the Israeli occupation is causing starvation, physical and psychological oppression to the Palestinian people, but he noted that there is Palestinian resistance, questioning the reason behind the EU's complicity with the Israeli occupation and why US funds are protecting this occupation.

The rapporteur described the EU countries as completely "hypocritical" because they refused the results of democratic elections supervised by them after they saw that the winner is Hamas, pointing out that the Europeans should have the bare minimum of principles.

Ziegler pointed out that the human situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is deteriorated, because the UN statistics revealed that 65 percent of the population of the West Bank are suffering from malnutrition; besides, the Gaza Strip, which is inhabited by more than 1.5 million people has turned into a big prison as a result of the Israeli siege imposed on it.

He also described the Quartet on the Middle East as a mere shop front, calling on the UN and the EU to withdraw from it as long as their presence in this Quartet is meaningless and useless.

As a validation for what the UN special rapporteur had stated about the suppressive policies of the Israeli occupation, the IOA started on Sunday to reduce the allocations of fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip under the Israeli government's resolution which considers the Gaza Strip as a "hostile entity".

The spokesman for Israeli war minister Ehud Barak told AFP that the reduction in the fuel supplies to Gaza will begin as of Sunday and that there will be frequent power outages in the next few days.