Carter: The Israeli siege is one of the greatest crimes against human rights

The Palestinian Information Center

26/05/2008 - 04:34 PM

LONDON, (PIC)-- Former US president Jimmy Carter strongly denounced Sunday the unjust Israeli siege imposed on the Gaza people as one of the greatest crimes against human rights existing now on Earth, adding that there is no reason to treat these people this way. During a speech at a literary festival in Wales, the 83-year-old Nobel peace prize laureate revealed that the Hebrew state possesses 150 nuclear warheads in its arsenal. Israel is the only nuke-armed country in the Middle East which has refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The European campaign to lift the siege had held the entire international community fully responsible for the Israeli siege which targeted all aspects of life in Gaza. Karen Abu Zayd, the UNRWA commissioner-general, also stated in Gaza days ago that the Palestinian people have the right to live like the other peoples in the world and pointed out that the Gaza residents are in a daily struggle for their livelihood because the Israeli siege paralyzed all service sectors in the Strip. In another context, a Palestinian woman called Hind Al-Ashqar, suffering from kidney failure, was proclaimed dead on Sunday in Gaza, which raised the number of the Israeli siege victims to 136 patients. The popular committee against the siege reported that the patient submitted more than one month and a half ago a request to the IOA to allow her to leave Gaza for medical treatment abroad, but she did not receive a reply. The committee noted that the patient was in need of an artery implant unavailable in Gaza hospitals to be able to use a dialysis machine regularly.