GENEVA, May 11: The head of an international human rights group on Wednesday accused the United States of “hypocrisy” for refusing to support the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes in Israel. Scott Leckie, Executive Director of the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), was speaking at a news conference launching a 240-page report on Israeli “seizure of land and housing in Palestine” since 1948.

“Although the US routinely supports the rights of refugees throughout the world to recover their former lands, homes and properties, it refuses to recognise that Palestinian refugees should also enjoy their legitimate property rights,” he said.

“The hypocrisy of the US stance ... is blatant and unjustifiable if terms such as human rights and the rule of law are to have universal application,” said Leckie, an international human rights lawyer.

More than four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, having fled homes in what is now Israel during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49.

Palestinians want Israel to implement U.N. resolution 194, which says that refugees have the right either to return to their original homes or receive compensation. Israel’s government — with the support of US President George W. Bush’s administration — refuses to admit refugees, fearing a large influx would be demographic suicide for a Jewish state of 6.6 million citizens.

Instead, it wants refugees resettled in a future Palestinian state and says it would contribute to a fund to compensate them.

Leckie said the US stance was particularly surprising since Washington was supporting the return to their homes in Iraq of Jewish Iraqis who fled the country under the rule of former president Saddam Hussein.

The COHRE report cast doubt on the viability of a Palestinian state — a project the United States strongly supports — that might be created in any final peace agreements between Israelis and Palestinians.

The report showed, Leckie said, “that what little remains of the Palestinian homeland is disappearing in front of our eyes — it’s as if Israel is deliberately erasing it from the map”.—Reuters