“The plan would crystallize a 21st-century apartheid, leaving in its wake the demise of the Palestinian’s right to self-determination. Legally, morally, politically, this is entirely unacceptable,” Lynk said, the Middle East Monitor reported on Wednesday.
The UN official described the repercussions of annexation as creating “a cascade of bad human rights consequences” and insisted that the international community can no longer play its acquiescent role to Israeli violations.
“The looming annexation is a political litmus test for the international community. This annexation will not be reversed through rebukes, nor will the 53-year-old occupation die of old age,” he warned.
Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party submitted a bill to the parliament (Knesset) that calls for the imposition of Tel Aviv’s “sovereignty” over the Palestinian regions of the Jordan Valley, the northern Dead Sea area and the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli regime has been sharply emboldened by US President Donald Trump’s pro-Israel polices, the latest of which is a contentious plot unveiled in January with the aim of legitimizing Israel’s occupation and re-drawing the Middle East map.
Trump’s self-proclaimed “deal of the century,” crafted to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also calls for the creation of a Palestinian state with limited control over its own security and borders.
The scheme — drawn up in close cooperation with the Netanyahu administration — bars Palestinian refugees from returning to their homeland while enshrines Jerusalem al-Quds as “Israel’s undivided capital” and allows the regime to annex settlements and the Jordan Valley.
The US has expressed its readiness to recognize Israel’s annexation of the occupied West Bank areas.