United Nations – The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling upon Israel to withdraw from the occupied Golan Heights, Russian news agency TASS reported.
A total of 91 countries voted in favor of the document, including Russia, Brazil, India, China and Saudi Arabia. Eight countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, voted against. 62 countries abstained.
The resolution was co-authored by a group of nations that includes Algeria, Venezuela, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, North Korea, Cuba, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, the United Arab Emirates, Syria and Tunisia.
The document contains eight provisions. The first one states that Israel has so far failed to implement the 1981 UN Security Council Resolution 497, which declares the Israeli annexation null and void.
Apart from that, the document “demands once more that Israel withdraw from all the occupied Syrian Golan to the line of 4 June 1967, in implementation of the relevant Security Council resolutions.”
It also determines that “the continued occupation of the Syrian Golan and its de facto annexation constitute a stumbling block in the way of achieving a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the region.”
Besides, the UN General Assembly “calls upon Israel to resume the talks on the Syrian and Lebanese tracks and to respect the commitments and undertakings reached during the previous talks” and “requests the Secretary-General to report to the General Assembly at its seventy-ninth session on the implementation of the present resolution.”
The Golan Heights, which belonged to Syria since 1944, were seized by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War. In 1981, the Israeli parliament passed a law unilaterally declaring sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The UN Security Council declared the annexation null and void in its Resolution 497 on December 17, 1981.
