While the Council has discussed that important issue for decades, we apprec...

While the Council has discussed that important issue for decades, we appreciate it all the more at a time when serious violations affecting the Syrian citizens in the occupied Golan and the Palestinian populations in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip persist, owing to the barbaric Israeli aggression. That aggression includes continuing the settlements, aggression against civilians, imposition of the blockade, prohibition of civilian access to humanitarian aid, and attacks on the humanitarian assistance flotillas and the international peace activists aboard them. Among the extraordinary paradoxes that have confronted the international community for decades, since the development of the concepts of international law and international humanitarian law, the suffering of civilians in armed conflict continues, despite the increased frequency of Security Council meetings devoted to such issues. The international community has made exceptional progress in international humanitarian law over the past centuries, but that law must not be implemented by applying it to the weak but not to the strong, nor by exonerating authorities of foreign occupation from the consequences of violating the rule and principles of international law.