Pro-Palestine group holds Senedd election leaders’ debate

Martin Shipton

A Senedd party leaders’ debate organised by Palestine Solidarity Campaign Cymru will be live-streamed on the evening of Tuesday March 24.

It will be accessible in real time via the PSC YouTube channel and will also be available to watch afterwards.

PSC Cymru spokesperson Andrew Draper said: “This is the moment when Palestine enters the Senedd election conversation.

“The aim is to hear clearly from each party what they would do – within Wales’ devolved powers – in relation to Palestine and international human rights.

“Questions have been submitted in advance by campaigners, medical volunteers and community members on divestment, on Welsh public money and on Wales’ responsibility to act. Party leaders will each have the opportunity to address them. The event will conclude with closing statements from them. Welsh interpretation will be available.

“All the major parties have been invited and any who don’t attend will be ‘empty-chaired’.

News of the debate came as a senior United Nations official said the world had given Israel a licence to torture Palestinians, with life in the occupied Palestinian territory “a continuum of physical and mental suffering”.

Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the rights situation in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, said that “torture has effectively become state policy” in Israel.

“Israel has effectively been given a licence to torture Palestinians, because most of your governments, your ministers, have allowed it,” she said, as she presented her latest report to the UN Human Rights Council.

“What once operated in the shadows is now practised openly: a regime of organised humiliation, pain and degradation, sanctioned at the highest political levels,” Albanese said in the report, titled “Torture and genocide”.

“Torture is not confined to cells and interrogation rooms,” the report outlined.

“Through the cumulative impact of mass displacement, siege, denial of aid and food, unrestrained military and settler violence, and pervasive surveillance and terror, the occupied Palestinian territory has become a space of collective punishment, where the destruction of the conditions of life turns genocidal violence into a tool of collective torture with long-term mental and physical consequences for the occupied population,” it added.

Albanese, an outspoken critic of Israeli action in the occupied West Bank and its genocidal war on Gaza, has faced backlash from Israel and the United States, with mounting calls for her removal from the position of special rapporteur.

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed at least 72,263 people and injured 171,944 others, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

In the occupied West Bank, since October 2023, Israeli authorities have arrested more than 18,500 Palestinians, including at least 1,500 children as of February, the report found.

Albanese called on UN member states to “prevent and punish” acts of torture and genocide, and uphold international law.

“Its increasing use as part of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people makes this violation all the more grave and indefensible,” she said.

“If the international community continues to tolerate such acts when inflicted on Palestinians, then the law itself will be stripped of meaning.”

Israeli settlers

Meanwhile it was reported that illegal Israeli settlers carried out coordinated attacks across 13 locations in the occupied West Bank since late Saturday, injuring Palestinians and causing widespread property damage.

The Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that illegal settlers launched simultaneous assaults across several governorates, setting fire to homes and vehicles and throwing stones at Palestinian cars.

The most severe attack targeted the village of al-Funduq near Jenin, where illegal settlers burned homes and vehicles and smashed windows, while residents attempted to confront them and extinguish fires, Wafa said.

In the northern Jordan Valley, settlers attacked Palestinians in the Ein al-Hilweh community and sprayed them with pepper spray, according to the agency.

Illegal settlers also threw stones at Palestinian vehicles in the Jordan Valley area along multiple roads, including the Ramallah-Nablus Road, near the Za’atara checkpoint, along a bypass road near Burin, near Haris west of Salfit and in Tuqu near Bethlehem, with no injuries reported in these attacks.

Early on Sunday, three Palestinians were wounded after settlers attacked the village of Jalud southeast of Nablus, setting fire to four vehicles and the village council building, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

The organisation said one of the injured suffered a deep head wound after being beaten during the attack.