Iceland recognises Palestinian state

Al Jazeera

First west European country to do so three months after Palestinians began to seek full membership of the UN.

Iceland has become the first west European country to formally recognise a Palestinian state, three months after the Palestinians began to seek full membership of the United Nations with peace talks with Israel frozen indefinitely.

"Iceland didn't only talk the talk, we walked the walk," Icelandic Foreign Minister Ossur Skarphedinsson said on Thursday at a news conference in Reykjavik.

"We stood by our word, we have supported the Palestinian cause and today will not be the end of that, we will continue to do so," he added.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki said: "[This] will surely have positive influence on other states to follow the same steps."

The two also announced the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Nordic island nation and the Palestinians.

"There will be an ambassador from Iceland that will present his credentials to the Palestinians, a non-resident, and ... we are contemplating the possibility of appointing an honorary consul, an Icelander, here for the time being," Malki said.

Thursday's ceremony at the Reykjavik Culture House follows two years of preparations and a vote in the Icelandic parliament, or Allthingi, on November 29 in favour of recognising the Palestinian state on the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war.

The move comes two days after the Palestinian flag was raised for the first time above the UNESCO headquarters in Paris to mark Palestine's admission to the education, science and culture body.

Admission to UNESCO has however had no impact on the Palestinians' bid for full UN membership. They would need nine votes out of 15 in the Security Council, but the US has made clear that it would veto the bid if needed.

Faced setbacks


"It was quite important for them [the Palestinians] at this point in time," Skarphedinsson told the AFP news agency.

"They have had setbacks in the Security Council and that is why we thought it would be right not to wait, but to go ahead now and I hope it will put some wind in their sails," he added, pointing out that "it is very symbolic for them that a western European nation, which is also in NATO, should at this moment step forward and recognise the sovereignty of Palestine".

"The timing was perfect," Malki agreed, pointing out that "it comes after a dry season" in terms of new recognitions of the Palestinian state.

More than 100 countries around the world have recognised the Palestinian state, according to the Palestinian officials.

Within the European Union, of which Iceland is not yet a member, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Malta have officially recognised Palestine.

Israel and the US have opposed any recognition of a Palestinian state not based on the outcome of negotiations. Washington's major west European allies echo this position.

While stressing that "for the time being there is no peace process," the Palestinian foreign minister said he hoped the recognition would help put pressure on Israel to "rethink again how to approach the peace process in a very positive manner this time".

Skarphedinsson meanwhile said he was sure Iceland's decision carried weight. "I noted that Iceland's vote and Iceland's determination on Palestine's admittance to UNESCO mattered in a few places, so I'd like to hope that this will help," he told AFP.

AP journo tweaks State Department over stance on Palestinians

Politico
Josh Gerstein

Victoria Nuland

I've noted before how, for whatever reason, the State Department press corps often seems more confrontational and assertive than the White House press contingent.

Another illustration of the State press corps' different model came Monday as Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee challenged State spokeswoman Victoria Nuland over the department's assertion that it was inappropriate for Palestinian representatives to seek recognition as a state from the U.N. cultural body UNESCO and her argument that it would be sensible for the U.S. to pull out of a related intellectual-property organization if the Palestinians receive state status there.

"I used to think that this government, my government, had some intellect itself, but this just seems ridiculous. You are going to oppose them in some kind of international weather organization as well? The Civil Aviation Organization?" Lee asked.

When Nuland said the U.S. was applying the same position to all U.N. agencies, Lee countered incredulously:

"You can — you think that there is somewhere — somewhere in this building that someone can draw a intellectually responsible and acceptable argument that membership in the World Intellectual Property Organization should not be granted to the Palestinians because they are not a state, because their intellectual property, because they’re not a state, is somehow less deserving of protection than anyone else’s, including the Syrians, including whoever else?"

After a bit more let-me-finish sparring, Nuland slapped back with: "Are you asking me a question that you’d like me to answer, or are you just going to have an argument with me today?"

Text of the full exchange after the jump. Full briefing text here. And video here.

UPDATE: Several Lee fans, including some pro-Israel voices, have rallied to Lee's defense on Twitter after some suggested he might have a pro-Palestinian bent.

"Matt Lee is a bulldozer. Only agenda is 2 make podium squirm & report news," former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block tweeted, comparing Lee to veteran AP State newsman Barry Schweid.

Indeed, at Tuesday's briefing, Lee gave Nuland so much grief over the lack of any State Department punishment for the Palestinians' defiance of U.S. wishes that the spokeswoman got grumpy.

"Is there a question here, Matt, or is this a speech? ... I’m serious, really," she said.

"Well, I’m serious, too. It just seems to me that there’s a profound lack of critical and intelligent thinking going on to this," Lee replied.

By Cutting UNESCO Funding, 'Obama Has Lost Credibility'

Der Spiegel

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Malki speaking at UNESCO on Oct. 31.

The Palestinians succeeded in their bid to become full members of UNESCO and the Americans followed through on their threat to cut off funding. German commentators, however, are unsure whether either party will benefit from the dispute.

The reaction from the US seemed almost inevitable. Once the Palestinians succeeded in Paris on Monday in their attempt to become a full member of UNESCO, the United Nations' cultural organization, the response from Washington came quickly. The US cut off its funding to UNESCO.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the US government was obliged under law to freeze its next UNESCO payment of $60 million (€43 million) which was due later this month. She said: "To admit Palestine as a member is regrettable and premature."

Previously, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon had expressed fears that the controversial inclusion of Palestine into UNESCO -- the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation -- could have damaging effects. He said: "We will need to work on practical solutions to preserve UNESCO's financial resources."

And the decision does indeed present a great danger to the financing of UNESCO: The biennial budget for 2010-2011 amounts to $653 million (€461 million), with the US responsible for about 22 percent of that. The three largest contributors also include Japan and Germany.

A 'Cascade' Effect
 
UNESCO has, however, survived without American funding in the past. The United States pulled out of the organization under Ronald Reagan, rejoining two decades later under George W. Bush.

Following their success, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki told the meeting in Paris: "This vote will erase a tiny part of the injustice done to the Palestinian people."

Palestine’s ‘last village’ faces the bulldozers

Global Research
Jonathon Cook

Lifta to make way for Jewish vacation homes

On a rocky slope dropping steeply away from the busy main road at the entrance to West Jerusalem is to be found a scattering of ancient stone houses, empty and clinging precariously to terraces hewn from the hillside centuries ago.

Although most Israeli drivers barely notice the buildings, this small ghost town -- neglected for the past six decades -- is at the centre of a legal battle fuelling nationalist sentiments on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.

Picking his way through the cluster of 55 surviving houses, their stone walls invaded by weeds and shrubs, Yacoub Odeh, 71, slipped easily into reminiscences about the halcyon days in Lifta.

He was only eight years old in January 1948 when the advancing Jewish forces put his family and the 3,000 other Palestinian villagers to flight.

Over the coming months, as the Jewish state was born, they would be joined by 750,000 others forced into exile in an event that is known by Palestinians as the “nakba”, or catastrophe.

Despite the passage of time, Lifta’s chief landmarks are still clear to Mr Odeh: the remains of his own family’s home, an olive press, the village oven, a spring, the mosque, the cemetery and the courtyard where the villagers once congregated.

“Life was wonderful for a small child here,” he said, closing his eyes. “We were like one large family. We played in the spring’s waters, we picked the delicious strawberries growing next to the pool.

“I can still remember the taste of the bread freshly baked by my mother and coated with olive oil and thyme.”

The village not only occupies a unique place in Mr Odeh’s affections. It has also come to symbolise a hope of eventual return for many of the nearly five million Palestinian refugees around the world.

In the words of Ghada Karmi, a British academic whose own family was forced from their home close by, in the Jerusalem suburb of Katamon, Lifta “remains a physical memorial of injustice and survival”.

The reason is that Lifta is the last deserted village from 1948 still standing in modern-day Israel.

More than 400 other villages seized by Israel war were razed during and after the war of 1948 in what historians have described as a systematic plan to make sure the refugees had no homes to return to.

Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian who examined the 1948 war in his book the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, has termed the villages’ destruction an act of “memoricide” -- erasing for Israelis all troubling reminders of an earlier Palestinian presence.

The destroyed villages’ lands were used by the new state either to build communities for Jewish immigrants or to plant national forests, said Eitan Bronstein, spokesman for Zochrot, an Israeli group dedicated to teaching Israelis about the nakba.

A handful of other Palestinian communities, such as the old city of Jaffa and Ein Hod near Haifa, survived the wave of demolitions but were quickly passed on to new Jewish owners to be reinvented as artists’ colonies.

Only Lifta was neither destroyed nor reinhabited, its homes standing as a solitary, silent testament to a vanished way of life, said Mr Bronstein.

But even that small legacy is under imminent threat from the bulldozers.

In January the Israel Lands Authority, a government body responsible for Lifta’s lands, announced a plan to build a luxury housing project over the village, including more than 200 apartments, a hotel and shops.

The project, said Meir Margalit, a Jerusalem city councillor, would be targeted at wealthy foreign Jews, mainly from the United States and France, looking for summer vacation homes in Israel.

The developers have promised to incorporate some of the old buildings into the complex, although most observers -- including leading architects -- say that little of the orginal Palestinian village will be recognisable after the project is completed.

Instead, according to Mr Bronstein, Lifta will belatedly suffer the same fate as the hundreds of villages destroyed by Israel decades ago. “The message is that we are finishing what we started in 1948,” he said.

Esther Zandberg, a commentator on architecture for the Israeli Haaretz daily, agreed: “Although it is termed a preservation effort, it is in effect, paradoxically, an erasure of all memory of the original village.”

Critics have been joined by Shmuel Groag, one of the project’s original architects, who has accused the developers of failing to respect the basic rules of conservation in their treatment of Lifta.

Israel appropriating historical sites for colonial ends

Uruknet 
Sarah Irving

Orthodox Jews walk past Israel’s wall near
Rachel’s Tomb in the occupied West Bank.

Moves by the Israeli government and settler movement to appropriate historical sites undermine Palestinian cultural rights and highlight how Israel exploits archaeological claims for colonial ends.

Last spring, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the Bilal Mosque/Rachel’s Tomb outside Bethlehem to be "Israeli national heritage sites." As The Electronic Intifada has reported since, the State of Israel seems to have two approaches to Palestine’s ancient sites. If, like the sites Netanyahu claimed or the remains at Sebastia, they fit into Israeli narratives about the Jewish history of the region, they are appropriated, renovated and incorporated into "archaeological parks." If, like excavated finds and important buildings in Gaza, they highlight ancient Philistine or more recent Islamic periods of history, they can be bombed along with Gaza’s residents, or simply allowed to decay as vital conservation chemicals are excluded by the blockade. As an American-accented tour guide, overheard in Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif in October 2010, put it: "Having worked on two or three archaeological digs here [in Jerusalem], I can tell you that if anything is between 200 and 500 years old, it just gets tossed. It’s nothing."

It’s against this setting that in October 2010, while researching a guidebook to Palestine, I found myself increasingly confused about a number of historical sites scattered around the occupied West Bank. None of them had the religious and historical importance of the Ibrahimi Mosque or Rachel’s Tomb, but they had their own place in Palestinian history and architecture. They were places mentioned in Palestinian tourism publications such as the locally-published Alternative Tourism Group travel guide Palestine and The Palestinians, the official Palestinian Authority Ministry of Tourism website, Jericho Municipality’s tourist listings or the "Places to Visit" section of the PA’s diplomatic mission to Japan website. This implied that they were recognized by Palestinian sources as being part of the country’s heritage. But the information about them was hazy, as if their existence was being acknowledged but at the same time they weren’t being incorporated into the itineraries of the growing Palestinian cultural tourism industry. Palestinian tour organizers I spoke to dismissed my inquiries, saying only that "I’ve never been there" or "we don’t take groups there." There was, I soon found, a very good reason for this.

The first site that mystified me is a cluster of remains south of Jerusalem, close to the recently-expanded highway that runs through the occupied West Bank desert toward Jericho and the Jordan River. This comprises three buildings (or groups of buildings), only one of which was visible from the main road. This is an Ottoman caravanserai (most of the building is 16th century, although it may have older Mamluk elements), where merchants and their baggage-trains once took refuge for the night on the bandit-ridden road. It’s known as the Khan al-Ahmar or, in the way that many buildings in Palestine pick up Biblical names, as the Inn of the Good Samaritan, a reference to one of Jesus’ parables.

The other two buildings in the cluster are the monasteries of St. Euthymius and St. Martyrius, both founded in the fifth century. Along with other cells, monasteries and lavras (groups of isolated hermits’ dwellings) of the Desert Fathers, these are some of the most ancient Christian monasteries in existence and immensely important to Palestine’s historical, architectural and religious heritage. In the 2008 edition of The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide From Earliest Times to 1700, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Professor of New Testament at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, Jerusalem refers to the Monastery of St. Euthymius as a "forlorn ruin surrounded by graceless factories." The factories Murphy-O’Connor mentions are those of Mishor Adumim, the industrial section of the sprawling and illegal settlement of Maale Adumim, which is a key part of Israel’s division of the occupied West Bank into unviable bantustans. Assuming that Murphy-O’Connor, researching the 2008 edition of his guide, saw it "forlorn" and abandoned in perhaps 2007, St. Euthymius’ monastery was not to remain a "ruin" for much longer.

Maale Adumim is apparently, like some of the Etzion Bloc settlements (which are increasingly selling themselves as wine tourism destinations), seeking to add heritage tourism to its economic activities. In 2009 an invitation to the opening of a "mosaic museum" at the Inn of the Good Samaritan was circulated around Israeli ministries and media. "On Behalf of the Head of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories," it offered a range of activities at the 4 June launch, including tours by "Civil Administration’s Staff Officer of Archeology and Antiquities." Tellingly, descriptions of the attractions on offer emphasized Second Temple-era and Byzantine Christian remains, but made no mention of the Ottoman and possibly earlier Islamic buildings of the caravanserai which is the core of the Khan al-Ahmar site. If there was ever any doubt on the subject, Israeli archaeology was exposed as being entirely complicit with the occupation, sidelining Palestine’s Islamic heritage, appropriating its Christian sites (and in doing so also sidelining Palestine’s own historic Christian communities) and highlighting its Jewish remains above those of the main other cultures which have enriched this land.

The website of the Maale Adumim settlement offered an insight into the activities at the three sites over the last couple of years. It declared that "The Municipality of Maale Adumim is developing the Good Samaritan’s Inn and the hills surrounding it as a tourist complex, aiming to meet the demand for modern tourism services without losing the site’s unique ancient nature" ("The Good Samaritan Inn"). The site details plans for "restoration of the existing building to accommodate incoming groups, including a praying and religious studies section. Development will include a motel and restaurant modeled in an authentic 'khan’ style." In the future, a 150-room "ecological hotel" will be built on the cliffs overlooking the site.

By February 2011, the final pieces fell into place when the website of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) declared "New Sites’ Opening – The Inn of The Good Samaritan and more." The INPA runs nature reserves and archaeological parks in both Israel and the occupied West Bank, including the one at Sebastia, which was previously reported on by The Electronic Intifada. 

According to the website, the Inn of The Good Samaritan, and the Euthymius and Martyrius monasteries are due to open to the public in July 2011. In addition, the mosaic museum and archaeological remains at these sites will also be opened to tourists. The entrance fees for the sites will pour into Israeli state coffers and, as they are situated within a settlement and will very possibly be run by settler staff, Palestinians will most likely be denied even the privilege of paying the 21 shekel ($6 US) ticket price to the Israeli occupation authorities to visit their own heritage.

A second example lies in the green, intricately curving hills of the central West Bank. On the road between Ramallah and Nablus, near the village of Luban al-Sharqiya and the small town of Sinjel, is Khirbet Seilun, or Tel Shilo. The layers of habitation deposits at the tel (an archaeological term referring to a hill made up of centuries of building remains) show that people have lived there since at least the Canaanite Bronze Age, and there are significant Roman, Byzantine and Islamic remains. Khirbet Seilun is regarded as sacred by some Jews because is has been identified by some historians as the Biblical Shiloh, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept for a period on its travels north from Mount Sinai. Excavations in the early 1980s uncovered remains from the Canaanite and Israelite periods, but nothing resembling the Tabernacle, the building which may have housed the Ark at Shiloh. More recent archaeological digs have been controversial because they have uncovered a spectacular Byzantine mosaic which some settlers want to move so they can continue searching for the Israelite sacred remains they believe lie beneath the three Byzantine churches and two small mosques on the site.

Unlike the Khan al-Ahmar and monasteries of St. Euthymius and St. Martyrius, a visitor center at Tel Shilo is already functioning. Rather than being managed by the INPA, the Tel Shilo site is run by the extremist settlers of Shiloh who, journalists and human rights groups report have been responsible for innumerable attacks, including shootings and arson, against neighboring Palestinian villages and olive farmers. The Shiloh settlement was founded in the 1970s by the Gush Emunim terrorist group, which exploded car bombs against the mayors of several Palestinian cities in 1980, seriously injuring Bassam Shakaa, then mayor of Nablus (see "Shiloh: An Obstacle to Peace," Time, 13 February 1978 and Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians, 2000, p 123). Shiloh and the archaeological remains it has appropriated are now marketed as a destination for pilgrimages and religious tourism but, perhaps unsurprisingly given the beliefs of the settlers here, some non-Jewish tourists report being turned away.

Controversy over the archaeological heritage of Khirbet Seilun looks set to escalate. Last month, The Jewish Press reported that the Israeli government had authorized large-scale new excavations at the site. The aims of the excavations were explicitly said by the paper to be "to showcase the life and times of ancient Israel," which suggests that the archaeologists carrying them out have specific intentions as to what they will find – or not find ("New archaeological effort seeks to unearth Mishkan’s secrets," 23 March 2011). The article did not name the director of the new excavations, but previous digs at Khirbet Seilun have been led by Rachel Ehrlich, a hard-line settler who, in a profile on one Christian Zionist website, was described as being "determined to put the site [of Shiloh] on the map [as] the place where the people of Israel first entered the land, where religious life for the Jewish people was centered for the 369 years the Tabernacle stood there" ("Uncovering our Past, Christian Friends of Israel Communities).

Tzofia Dorot, the manager of the Shiloh visitor center, made some telling comments to The Jewish Press about the importance to settler public relations of Israel’s appropriation of heritage sites. She claimed that Shiloh has been "seeing more and more local and foreign visitors" and that three companies with proposals for a "major visitor center" had visited the settlement. This activity occurred in spite of the skepticism from archaeologists about whether Dorot’s "headline-making discoveries" were really likely to be made.

Tzofia Dorot’s comments to The Jewish Press illustrate why the expropriation of Palestinian heritage sites – whether by the State of Israel or by settler groups acting as its proxies – has a significance well beyond the loss of individual buildings or artifacts. In the eyes of settlers and their supporters, in Israel and beyond, stealing Palestinian archaeological and architectural heritage isn’t just about attracting tourists with open wallets. It’s about asserting settler claims to the land, by emphasizing Jewish history over and above that of the peoples and faiths who came before and after them in Palestine. It is also about presenting the Jewish people as the legitimate custodians of Palestine’s Christian heritage, diverting attention from Israeli oppression of the world’s oldest and longest-lived Christian communities and reinforcing misconceptions about the Palestinian struggle as a religious rather than anti-colonial movement. As Dorot sees it, the international "effort to discredit and delegitimize our connection to the Land of Israel is gathering steam." Thus, showing settler archaeology to gullible tourists, she believes, will be vital in countering "the international community’s clamoring for Israel to make concessions."

Meanwhile, Palestinian heritage organizations such as PACE and Riwaq are increasingly using models of community participation to raise awareness of the value of archaeological remains and the importance of protecting them (Ghattas J. Sayej, "Palestinian archaeology: knowledge, awareness and cultural heritage, Present Pasts, Vol 2, 2010). In Jerusalem, the Centre for Jerusalem Studies and Emek Shaveh are fighting official and settler expropriation of cultural and historical sites. But defending Palestine’s cultural heritage from the Israeli state and settlers is still low on the priority list.

Archaeologists, including Hamdan Taha, director-general of the PA’s Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, have voiced their concerns. And in March 2010 Algeria, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Tunisia submitted a provisional agenda item on Netanyahu’s claims at the Haram al-Khalil and Rachel’s Tomb to the UNESCO executive board meeting, noting that "much of the settlement enterprise is concentrated around archaeological areas where Israel makes claims of exclusive heritage, including the settlements of Shilo, Bet El and Kiryat Arba" (see UNESCO Executive Board, Hundred and eighty-fourth session, Item 37 of the provisional agenda, 19 March 2010 [PDF]). After initial failure to reach an agreement, UNESCO declared that it "regretted" Israel’s inclusion of the Haram al-Khalil and Bilal ibn Rahmeh Mosque on a list of its heritage sites and urged it to remove it; it also "regretted" Israel’s "unilateral actions" regarding historical sites in Jerusalem; no mention was made of Tel Shilo (see UNESCO Executive Board, Hundred and eighty-fifth session, Decisions adopted by the executive board, 19 November 2010 [PDF]). But much greater international recognition of and opposition to Israel’s cultural colonialism is needed, if Palestine’s heritage is to be preserved, both for its cultural significance and economic potential.

Sarah Irving is a freelance writer. She worked with the International Solidarity Movement in the occupied West Bank in 2001-02 and with Olive Co-op, promoting fair trade Palestinian products and solidarity visits, in 2004-06. She now writes full-time on a range of issues, including Palestine. Her first book, Gaza: Beneath the Bombs, co-authored with Sharyn Lock, was published in January 2010. She is currently working on a new edition of the Bradt Guide to Palestine and a biography of Leila Khaled.

Ongoing violence leading to rising displacement in Libya, says UN agency

UN News

Libya 25 March 2011 – The United Nations refugee agency said it is receiving reports of increased displacement in Libya, while the numbers of people fleeing the North African nation amid what Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called “the brutal campaign of violence by the Libyan regime against its own people” have remained steady.

Non-governmental partners working with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimate that up to 20,000 people have been taking refuge in the small town of Al Butwen, east of Ajdabiya for over two weeks, while some 5,000 people are displaced in the coastal town of Derna.

The agency has sent two convoys with medical supplies to the rebel-held city of Benghazi through the Egyptian Red Crescent and the Libyan Red Crescent, as well as thousands of blankets, sleeping mats and other relief items.

However, UNHCR does not currently have access to deliver humanitarian aid into other parts of Libya, spokesperson Melissa Fleming told a news conference in Geneva.

Colonel Muammar Al-Qadhafi has waged a fierce military crackdown in response to the protests that erupted in Libya last month as part of a wider movement calling for reform across North Africa and the Middle East.
As of 23 March, more than 350,000 people have fled the violence in Libya, with most of them going to neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia, said UNHCR. It added that the numbers of those fleeing have remained steady over the past few days.

Yesterday Mr. Ban reported to the Security Council that although the Libyan authorities have repeatedly claimed to have instituted a ceasefire, there has been no evidence of that.

“To the contrary, fierce battles have continued in or around the cities of Ajdabiya, Misratah and Zitan, among others. In short, there is no evidence that Libyan authorities have taken steps to carry out their obligations under Resolutions 1970 or 1973,” he said, referring to last week’s resolution and an earlier one calling for a ceasefire and full protection of civilians.

In a related development, the head of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Irina Bokova, today condemned the killing of Libyan journalist Mohammed al-Nabbous on 19 March and called for all journalists detained in the country to be freed.

According to the International Press Institute, the 28-year-old founder of online channel Libya Al-Hurra, or Free Libya, was killed by snipers in Benghazi during an attack on the city by pro-Qadhafi forces.

“His tragic death, along with numerous reports of journalists being detained in the country, indicates just how dangerous Libya has become for media workers,” Ms. Bokova stated in a news release.

“In keeping with the Geneva Conventions to which Libya is a State party, it is essential that all those in positions of power in the country respect the right of journalists to do their work unhindered,” she added.

Mr. al-Nabbous is the second journalist to be killed in Libya within the past two weeks, said UNESCO. Ali Hassan al-Jaber, a cameraman with Al Jazeera, was killed in an apparent ambush last week.