The Palestinian UN ambassador is urging the Security Council to immediately provide international protection for the Palestinian people as as trigger-happy Israeli police killed three more Palestinians in east Jerusalem and occupied West Bank on Saturday. Riyad Mansour told an emergency Council meeting Friday called by Arab states that the issue of protection "has become more urgent than any time before" because of what he described as Israeli aggression "against our defenseless Palestinian people." He warned that the escalating violence "threatens that the conflict will become a religious one that will destroy everything." Mansour called on the Council to implement a 1994 resolution adopted after a Jewish settler killed 29 Muslim worshippers at a holy site in Hebron. It called on Israel "to guarantee the safety and protection of the Palestinian civilians throughout the occupied territory" including by "a temporary international or foreign presence." A senior UN official blamed Israel's long occupation of Palestinian territory and diminishing prospects for achieving a Palestinian state for transforming "long-simmering Palestinian anger into outright rage." Taye-Brook Zerihoun, the assistant secretary-general for political affairs, told an emergency Security Council meeting on Friday that this "stark reality" has been compounded by increasingly dire economic conditions, including bleak employment prospects for Palestinian youths, and expanding Israeli settlement activities. Zerihoun warned Israel that the current crisis cannot be resolved by security measures alone. Two of Saturday's attacks happened in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron where some 500 Jewish settlers live in a heavily guarded enclave in the city centre surrounded by nearly 200,000 Palestinians. The third happened at a checkpoint in a Jewish settlement neighborhood of Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem. In the first attack in Hebron, a Palestinian allegedly tried to stab a settler before being shot dead by his victim, the army said. Palestinian security sources identified the Palestinian as 18-year-old Fadel Al-Kawatsmi. The army said the settler was not hurt. — Agencies
