A Palestinian diplomat in a UN team visiting this country on Tuesday asked Trinidad and Tobago to help end Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip and to recognise Palestine as a State.
Palestine's permanent observer to the UN, Riyad Mansour, made this call at a briefing at the UN office in Port of Spain, with diplomats from three sympathetic nations. He is part of the UN's Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, set up in 1975 to champion Palestinian rights and a peaceful resolution to the question of Palestine.
Last October 7, hundreds of Hamas fighters attacked communities in Israel, killing 1,200 people and seizing 250 as hostages to Gaza, amid reported sexual assaults (said BBC News). Since then, Israel's attack on Gaza has killed 33,000 people and destroyed many buildings and facilities. Israel was created as a State in 1948 on lands where Jews had an ancestral connection, but where hundreds of thousands of resident Arabs were expelled in an episode called Al Nakba (the catastrophe), and replaced by an influx of Jews fleeing persecution in Europe particularly under Nazism.
Mansour said he had met Minister of Foreign Affairs Dr Amery Browne.
"We were received in a very warm and perceptive way by the Honourable Foreign Minister Browne."
He said the delegation asked for TT to recognise the State of Palestine.
"He said, 'Our doors are open.'
"We welcome that, we appreciate that, and we want to continue the dialogue and discussion to see an implementation of what we hope would be the promising recognition of the State of Palestine soon, the best investment in peace and saving the two-State solution."
Mansour said the mission also discussed visas for people holding Palestinian passports.
"We have 141 countries that recognise us. It should not be difficult for Palestinians to receive visas, to be allowed to come to this country for business, for education, for whatever."
Palestinians should be easily processed to enter TT, he said, rather than an immigration officer not seeing Palestine on his list of known countries.
He hoped for a good relationship with TT and the region, saying only four or five out of 33 regional countries had not yet recognised Palestine.
The diplomat said Palestinians had faced atrocity and suffering in general, and more so now in Gaza.
Saying Israel has pushed Palestinians from north to central to south Gaza, and next to "God knows where" or perhaps the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, he said, "We don't need another Nakba."
Accusing Israel of a false narrative, he said reacting to October 7 did not licence them to kill 35,000 Palestinians, three-quarters of whom were women, children or the elderly.
Mansour said 80,000 Palestinians have been wounded, even as starvation was being used as a weapon of war amid reports of famine in Gaza.
"We support the UN secretary general demanding a humanitarian ceasefire. We need a ceasefire!"
He said Palestinians were real human beings, with names, stories, relatives and lives. The UN team in its
