Palestinian foreign minister starts speaking

Riyad al-Maliki outlines the importance of the “historic proceedings”.

“I stand before you as 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, half of them children, are besieged and bombed, killed and maimed, starved and displaced,” he says.

“As more than 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are subjected to colonisation of their territory and the racist violence that enables it,” adds al-Maliki.

“As 1.7 million Palestinians in Israel are treated as second class citizens … in their ancestral land.”