Hamas urges UN to hold Israel accountable for its crimes

The Gaza-run Islamic Hamas movement on Monday urged the United Nations to hold Israel's criminals accountable for their crimes against the Palestinian people. 

Hamas' remarks came following the first UN Global Congress of Victims of Terrorism, which concluded on Friday at the UN headquarters in New York with a commitment to strengthen support for terrorism's victims.

"The international community have a great opportunity to confirm to us (Palestinians) that they support resistance to the Israeli occupation that violates our land and holy sites," Hamas said in a press statement sent to The New Arab. 

"Palestinian people are victims of the most dangerous and longest ongoing terrorist occupation in the world that was existed in our area for more than 70 years," the statement added. 

Because of the Israeli crimes, Hamas said,  hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed, hundreds of thousands were wounded, thousands were detained in Israeli jails and millions were displaced as refugees. 

"These are some facts of stories of the unbearable suffering the Palestinians have been experiencing due to the Israeli occupation of Palestine," the movement stressed. 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on for decades, following the Zionist occupation during the forcible and colonial creation of Israel in 1948.

During the 1948 war, 957,000 Palestinians, or 66 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in historical Palestine, were expelled and displaced.