Iranian foreign minister says Western countries complicit in Israeli crimes

Tehran, May 21 (RHC)-- Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says some Western states' routine way of backing the oppressor against the oppressed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict amounts to their abetment of the Israeli regime’s atrocities.

Zarif made the remarks to a Thursday meeting of the United Nations General Assembly held to address more than a week of significant and hugely deadly escalation by the Israeli regime against the blockaded Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip.

“The immoral approach of some Western governments in equating victims with culprits is reprehensible, unjust, and unacceptable,” said the statement that was read out by Majid Takht Ravanchi, Iran’s permanent ambassador to the UN.  Such approach, the statement added, “amounts to complicity in the crimes perpetrated against Palestinians.”

The foreign minister was referring to the decades-old attitude on the part of the United States and its European allies of upholding the occupying and aggressive regime’s so-called “right to defend itself” against the Palestinians.

Those states have reiterated the position since last Monday, when the regime began ramping up its assaults against Gaza.  Hundreds of Palestinians have died and more than 1,400 others injured in the escalation.

Citing an instance of the unjust approach, Zarif noted how the U.S. has been preventing the United Nations Security Council from upholding the UN Charter by passing the relevant resolution in condemnation of the savagery.

“And yet, the Security Council – despite the continued mass dispossession, occupation, and persecution of the Palestinian people by the Israeli regime – remains obstructed by the U.S. from upholding its Charter duties and shouldering its responsibility to stop violation of United Nations resolutions,” he said.

The top diplomat also pointed to the regime’s intensified attacks against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank over the past weeks, including its efforts to evict them from the territory’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

He underscored that the atrocities had come against the backdrop of “more than seven decades,” through which “the Israeli brutal policies and practices have continued to violate the fundamental human rights and dignity of the Palestinian people.”

Zarif urged the Assembly to live up to its duty to condemn the Israeli brutality, and reiterated Iran’s changeless support for the Palestinians in the face of the regime’s occupation and aggression.