UK-Canada -Australia and Portugal formally recognized the State of Palestine

The UK, Canada ,Australia and Portugal have formally recognized the State of Palestine. The move comes as more than 140 world leaders are preparing to attend the annual United Nations General Assembly summit in New York next week, which will be dominated by questions regarding the region.

Earlier in September, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly supported a resolution calling for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. In opposing the measure, Washington and West Jerusalem were only joined by eight other countries, including the remote Pacific island nations of Palau, Tonga, Micronesia and Nauru.

The subsequent Israeli siege of Gaza has left nearly 65,000 Palestinians dead so far, according to local health authorities, and produced a devastating humanitarian situation in the enclave, leading to mounting international pressure on West Jerusalem to end its campaign.

Many countries have since condemned the war and a number have chosen to acknowledge Palestinian statehood. At the upcoming UNGA session, France and Belgium are expected to follow suit and formally recognize the country.

Moscow views a two-state solution as the only way to deescalate and end the Gaza War. As the legal successor to the Soviet Union, Russia has long recognized the State of Palestine.

UN expert calls on world to end trade with Israel’s ‘economy of genocide’

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, has called on countries to cut off all trade and financial ties with Israel, including a full arms embargo, and withdraw international support for what she termed an “economy of genocide”.

Albanese made the comments in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday as she presented her latest report, which named dozens of companies she said were involved in supporting Israeli repression and violence towards Palestinians.

“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is apocalyptic,” she said. “Israel is responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history.”

The report, titled From economy of occupation to economy of genocide, detailed what it described as “the corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory”.

The report singled out companies, including arms manufacturers, tech giants, heavy machinery companies and financial institutions, for their “complicity” in Israel’s repression of Palestinians, from sustaining Israeli expansion on occupied land to enabling the surveillance and killing of Palestinians.

The report said that while political leaders had been shirking their responsibilities to pressure Israel to halt its bloodshed in Gaza, “far too many corporate entities have profited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now, genocide”.

Nearly 57,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the war, now in its 22nd month began, hundreds of thousands have been displaced multiple times, cities and towns have been razed, hospitals and schools targeted, and 85 percent of the besieged and bombarded enclave is now under Israeli military control, according to the UN.