Advancement of women/Israel statement – GA Third Cttee debate – Summary record (excerpts)

Third Committee 

Summary record of the 11th meeting 

Held at Headquarters, New York, on Tuesday, 16 October 2012, at 3 p.m. 

 Chair:  Ms. Šćepanović (Vice-Chair) …………………………………….  (Montenegro) 

 later:  Ms. Alfeine (Vice-Chair) …………………………………………………..  (Comoros) 

Contents 

In the absence of Mr. Mac-Donald, Ms. Šćepanović (Montenegro), Vice-Chair, took the Chair. 

Agenda item 28: Advancement of women (A/67/220, A/67/227 and A/C.3/67/L.2) (continued) 

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4.  Mr. Elbahi (Sudan) …

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8.  Recalling that the United Nations had continued to monitor the situation of Palestinian women and other women living under occupation in the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon, he said that it was incumbent on the international community to address the outrageous violations of those women’s rights and dignity resulting from Israel’s occupation of Arab territory. 

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55.  Ms. Al-Amri (Qatar) …

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58.  Women in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the occupied Syrian Golan continued to suffer violations of their rights under the Israeli occupation, which deprived them of their basic rights to education, health care, security and freedom of movement, and had a major negative impact on all aspects of life.

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88.  Ms. Zaslansky (Israel), speaking in exercise of the right of reply, said that she could easily discredit each and every one of the baseless accusations made against Israel in the course of the day’s discussions. It was strange to hear the observer for Palestine discuss the situation in Gaza without even once mentioning Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization which was committed to Israel’s destruction and had violently seized control of Gaza in 2007. In addition to firing tens of thousands of rockets at the Israeli civilian population and murdering hundreds of Israeli women, Hamas subjugated Palestinian women as a matter of policy. In Gaza, divorced women who remarried lost custody of their children, and women were not allowed to sing in public, ride bicycles or walk in the street with any man other than their husband. The so-called “morality police” arrested and inflicted beatings on women for such infractions as dressing immodestly. 

89.  Honour killings were on the increase in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. According to a 2011 survey by the Palestinian Authority, 30 per cent of all Palestinian married women, and over 50 per cent in the Gaza Strip, experienced domestic violence in their lifetime. That was the reality of Hamas in Gaza, yet Palestinian representatives never referred to the true issues of oppression. If the Palestinians were genuinely interested in improving the situation of women, they would not ignore the factors exacerbating their plight. It was clearly easier to blame Israel than to deal with the real issues. 

90.  She had been surprised to hear the Syrian representative expressing concern for women in the Golan Heights. Surely the Committee would have been much more interested to hear about the situation of women in Homs, Hama and Damascus. 

91.  Mr. Jawhara (Syrian Arab Republic) said that the representative of the occupying authority, Israel, was clearly in an unenviable position following the wave of condemnations and denunciations of racist Israeli policy by his own and other delegations. The Israeli delegation was therefore attempting to distort what was happening Syria in order to distract attention from Israeli practices. The Israeli occupying forces continued to perpetrate all kinds of crime, including violence against women, in the occupied Arab territories in Palestine and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The representative of such a terrorist entity should not lecture or make blind accusations at a time when Israel continued to perpetrate all kinds of acts of violence against Palestinian women and girls in the occupied Palestinian territories, where Israeli practices prevented many women from reaching hospital in time to give birth.