Foreign Desk Report
RAMALLAH/GAZA: Palestine condemned the agreement between Israel and the United States on funding scientific research projects in the occupied Palestinian territories, including Israeli settlements.
According to reports by Israeli media, Israel and the U.S. signed an agreement earlier on Wednesday that removes restrictions on including institutions in settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Golan Heights in scientific and technological binational projects.
The move has outraged the Palestinians, who expressed deep concerns that the action could be the first step toward an American recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.
“Palestine condemns the expansion of U.S. funding of Israeli scientific cooperation to include research projects in the illegal Israeli settlements,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesperson of the Palestinian president, said in a press statement.
He added that lifting the ban on U.S. funding of Israeli scientific research projects in the settlements in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 “is a serious precedent that is condemned, rejected, and could not be tolerated.”
Abu Rudeineh said that the move indicates an active U.S. complicity in occupying the Palestinian territories, adding that it is a consolidation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy of violating international law.
Abu Rudeineh said that Palestine rejects the U.S. policies, “which attempt to empower Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories,” and affirmed that such policies would never give legitimacy to the Israeli settlements.
Meanwhile, Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee, accused Trump of preempting U.S. elections by recognizing the Israeli plan of annexing parts of the West Bank.
The agreement between the U.S. and Israel is a blatant and unlawful act, Ashrawi said in a press statement.
She added that extending the Trump administration’s funding of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank “shows that this administration is involved in the Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians.”
In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said in a press statement that “lifting the ban on scientific cooperation with settlements in the West Bank shows the U.S. participation in the aggression against our people.”
Israeli settlement activities in the West Bank have been among the most thorny issues that block the peace process and keep the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians flaring.
Direct peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians stopped in 2014 after the U.S. sponsored it for nine months without achieving any tangible progress or breakthrough.
