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IPFS News Link • Israel - Palestine

Palestinians have a legal right to armed struggle

• aljazeera.com By Stanley L Cohen

Long ago, it was settled that resistance and even armed struggle against a colonial occupation force is not just recognised under international law but specifically endorsed.

In accordance with international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (pdf), as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere.

Finding evolving vitality in humanitarian law, for decades the General Assembly of the United Nations (UNGA) - once described as the collective conscience of the world - has noted the right of peoples to self-determination, independence and human rights.  

Indeed, as early as 1974, resolution 3314 of the UNGA prohibited states from "any military occupation, however temporary".

In relevant part, the resolution not only went on to affirm the right "to self-determination, freedom and independence [...] of peoples forcibly deprived of that right,[...] particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination" but noted the right of the occupied to "struggle ... and to seek and receive support" in that effort. 


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