This week, the Israeli army attacked the offices of seven Palestinian human rights and civil society organizations
by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service
The U.S. Capitol (Photo courtesy of the Office of Public Witness)
LOUISVILLE — The Office of Public Witness is asking Presbyterians to support House Resolution 751 and condemn this week’s attacks by the Israeli army against seven prominent Palestinian human rights and civil society organizations.
“This violent act of repression is a transparent effort to silence, repress, and intimidate Palestinian human rights defenders and disrupt their work to expose the Israeli government’s war crimes and human rights violations” OPW said on Thursday.
Last fall, U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minnesota) introduced a resolution opposing the designation of six Palestinian human rights groups as “terrorist” organizations.
The groups attacked this week work closely with the international community to develop Palestinian civil society, document human rights violations and defend Palestinians in Israeli courts. For many years, several of these organizations, along with others working to document human rights violations against Palestinians, have contended with the Israeli military raiding their offices, contributing to the shrinking of civil society spaces in the occupied Palestinian territories. Labeling these organizations as “terrorist” undermines the credibility of these groups within the international community and is a direct assault on the basic human rights of Palestinians, according to OPW.
Click here to read a November 2021 statement by the Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, II, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Click here to read a letter written last October by U.S. church and faith-based organizations to Secretary of State Antony Blinken .
Click here to urge Congress to defend Palestinian human rights organizations and to cosponsor H Res 751.
The Office of Public Witness is one of the Compassion, Peace & Justice ministries of the Presbyterian Mission Agency.
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.