The official spokesman for the US State Department, Ned Price , said that the position of the administration of US President Joe Biden has not changed regarding the Palestinian human rights organizations that were raided by the Israeli occupation authorities last Thursday, after the newspaper "The Guardian" " revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concluded that the claimed by Israel to include Palestinian human rights organizations on the list of terrorism is not convincing to link these organizations to the activities and Palestinian groups listed on the list of terrorism.
"I think the article you´re referring to referring to what purports to be a leaked intelligence assessment, of course, I´m not in a position to confirm or speak to any intelligence assessments," Price, who was responding to Al-Quds .com reporter´s questions regarding the CIA report, said the Guardian. .
The spokesperson added, “What I can say is what I said last week: We are in direct contact with our Israeli partners regarding more information about the actions that Israel has taken against these NGOs, and we continue to seek additional information from our Israeli partners — the fact has not changed that we we remain concerned about the effects of closing these Palestinian NGOs´ offices in and around Ramallah, and have made clear to our Israeli and Palestinian counterparts that independent civil society organizations in the West Bank and Israel must be able to continue their important work."
“We value the work of civil society, including the monitoring of human rights violations and abuses that are monitored by independent NGOs in the West Bank, Gaza, Israel and other places around the world, as you know, we have long designated the PFLP as a terrorist organization,” Price said. At the same time, we have not identified any of these NGOs nor have we funded any of these groups over the years, but we continue to seek additional information from our Israeli partners.”
In response to the Al-Quds.com reporter´s question, that apart from the Guardian article, there are nine US allies including Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, other countries and so on - they basically said that the evidence is practically fabricated and everything that Israel is trying to do. It is to drain the funding for these organizations to stop their work, which exposes the violations of the human rights of the Palestinian people under occupation by the Israeli occupation authorities.
"The truth has not changed," Price said. "We are concerned about what we saw last week. We have had conversations with our Israeli partners. We have sought additional information and they have pledged to provide additional information. We have continued to contact them, as I indicated last year, following the classification of these Organizations, the Israelis provided us with a large amount of information on the basis for their classification of these organizations, and we in turn distributed it to US government agencies with expertise in these matters who could analyze that information with us, as I said last Thursday, we haven´t seen anything yet, or anything It was presented to us privately or anything we saw in public that changed our attitude or our approach to these organizations.”
“Our relationship with these organizations has always been a little different from the relationship between our allies in the European Union,” Price explained. “We, on our part, did not fund these organizations, but we did not categorize them either, and again, we did not see anything in the information that was made available last year or that It was recently made available that would change our position ."
Washington: Our position on Palestinian human rights organizations has not changed after the CIA report
