Today, Sunday, the first commercial shipments of products from Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories began to the UAE.
The Israeli Channel Seven said, on its website, that the first shipments of olive oil and honey set off from the northern West Bank to the Emirate of Dubai.
The channel quoted the head of the Settlements Council in the occupied West Bank, Yossi Dagan, while supervising the export process, as saying that it is "an historic day."
Legalization of settlement
Commenting on the matter, the Palestinian government’s Ministry of National Economy said that marketing settlement products in the UAE is a legalization of settlements and a circumvention of the rights of the Palestinian people.
Today, the ministry called on the Emirati companies to back off the illegal move, which would enhance settlement activity on the Palestinian land.
The Ministry called on the Arab League to take the measures followed in banning settlement products for the Arab and Islamic markets, in accordance with the decisions of the Arab summits.
Hamas condemns
For its part, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) condemned the matter, and the movement’s spokesman, Hazem Qassem, said that what happened was an insistence on the sin of signing the normalization agreement.
He considered the trade exchange between the two sides as an encouragement to settle settlement on Palestinian lands in the West Bank, and he saw it as a push for the displacement policy practiced by the "Zionist right."
Israel and the UAE signed, in mid-September, an agreement to normalize relations between them, under the auspices of US President Donald Trump, and the agreement was met with widespread Arab popular rejection.