European Parliament President Roberta Metsola (L) shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett during her visit to the Israeli-occupied territories earlier this week (Photo via Twitter)
Brussels, June 3 (RHC)-- Authorities from the European Union (EU) are reportedly causing suffering to Palestinian cancer patients as part of a campaign to appease the Tel Aviv regime.
According to a report published by the online Electronic Intifada publication, the 27-member bloc has withheld a large proportion of funding provided to help support Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation – nearly $230 million – under the pretext that Palestinian school textbooks need to undergo revisions and changes.
According to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), the suspension of aid since last year is badly affecting critical sectors and paralyzing services, including healthcare in East al-Quds, where hospitals provide life-saving treatments to Palestinians from across the occupied territories.
“These restrictions punish terminally ill patients who cannot get life-saving medicine and force children to go hungry when parents cannot afford to buy food. Palestinians are paying the cruelest price for political decisions made in Brussels,” Jan Egeland, the NRC’s secretary-general, said earlier this week.
The rights group highlighted that at least 500 cancer patients, diagnosed since last September, have been unable to access adequate, life-saving treatments at Augusta Victoria Hospital in occupied East al-Quds.
The Electronic Intifada went on to highlight that the EU’s anti-Palestinian political decisions appear largely to be the result of a campaign waged by Olivér Várhelyi, a senior official in the European Commission. It said Várhelyi has been promoting Israel lobbyists’ lies that Palestinian school textbooks contain anti-Semitism and “glorify terrorism.”
The Electronic Intifada noted that the flat-out lies about Palestinian textbooks are part of a long-running disinformation campaign by the Israeli regime and its lobby groups in Brussels.
The campaign aims to promote the ludicrous claims that Palestinians are hostile to Israel not because it has brutally violated their most fundamental rights for decades, but because they are being brainwashed to hate Israel and Jews in their classrooms.
The outrageous claims are also a tool to constantly pressure the Palestinian Authority to collaborate even more with Israel. Additionally, European Union officials are publicly expressing their full support for ongoing Israeli attacks on Palestinians.
Earlier this week, Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament, went on a high-profile junket to the occupied territories, where she met with Israeli president Isaac Herzog, prime minister Naftali Bennett and foreign minister Yair Lapid.
Metsola did not criticize Israel’s brutal policies against millions of Palestinians, which Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups have characterized as apartheid, and astonishingly termed the Israeli parliament as a “house of democracy.”
The senior EU official also turned a blind eye on the Tel Aviv regime’s escalating crimes against Palestinians, including its recent targeted killing of veteran journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the occupied northern West Bank city of Jenin, and urged that the “partnership between the EU and Israel should be further strengthened.”
Leading Palestinian human rights organizations have sent an open letter to Metsola, denouncing her decision to visit the occupied territories even after Israeli authorities denied entry to her colleague Manuel Pineda, who is a member of the European Parliament (MEP) and the head of the EU-Palestine relations delegation.
They also condemned her offer of stronger ties with Israel, while failing even to mention the assassination of Abu Akleh as well as Israel’s expulsions of Palestinians from the Masafer Yatta area of eastern West Bank.
The groups told Metsola that “you have failed to fulfill your responsibility under international law and make yourself complicit in the institutionalized domination and systematic oppression of the Palestinian people.”
