11 May 2007 - Green Party Euro-MP Caroline Lucas has called on Israel to end the occupation of Palestine and the UK to restore full links with the Palestinian Authority to prevent a humanitarian disaster and an escalation of the conflict.

"Forty years after the six-day-war, in which the Israeli army took military control of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Palestine is still under illegal Israeli occupation.

"The human rights of Palestinians are routinely abused: freedom of movement and freedom from arbitrary arrest are almost non-existent for Palestine’s Arab population.

"Schools and hospitals are chronically under-funded, there is widespread and growing unemployment - and there has been a dramatic increase in the number of Palestinians living in poverty in the last year alone.

"This unlawful occupation has been going on for far too long, causing terrible suffering and injustice. For the sake of humanitarianism, justice, peace and democracy, it is time to end it once and for all: and we in the UK should use the ’stick’ of international and EU law to put pressure on Israel to do.

"Until Israel conforms to all previous security council resolutions and ends the occupation, stops building its ’separation barrier’ - also unlawful, according to the International Court of Justice - and demonstrates it fully respects the rights of Palestinians, we must suspend the EU-Israel Association agreement, which governs political, economic and cultural links between EU countries and Israel."

Dr Lucas, who has just returned from Palestine as a member of the European Parliament’s official delegation to the occupied Palestinian territories, made her comments ahead of a mass demonstration and rally against the occupation in London this Saturday (June 9).

The MEP will speak alongside Palestinian Minister of Information Mustafa Barghouti, former CND chair Bruce Kent, several MPs, Ismael Patel of the friends of Al Aqsa and others. Full details are available on the Enough Occupation! Website www.enoughoccupation.org.uk

She added: "Living conditions in the Palestinian occupied territories have been deteriorating for years at the hands of the occupying Israeli forces, and Governments in the EU are making this worse by refusing to deal directly with democratically-elected Hamas members of the Palestinian Authority.

"This not only strikes a blow at the apparatus and legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority, it undermines democracy in the Middle East, and sends a clear signal to the Israeli government that it can take the same attitude.

"Israel must end the occupation, and the UK government must renormalise relations with the Palestinian Authority - or life will get harder for Palestinians as poverty, human rights abuses and conflict steadily worsen."

ENDS

For more details on the campaign, please visit  Enough Occupation.