12m ago (04:15 GMT) Outrage after Harris, Wong refer to Majdal Shams as an Israeli town Legal experts have criticised statements from US Vice President Kamala Harris and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong that described Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights as an Israeli town, although it is located in territory that is internationally recognised as part of Syria.
Israel occupied two-thirds of the strategic Golan Heights plateau after capturing it in the Six-Day War in 1967, and annexed the territory in 1981.
Adil Haque, a law professor at Rutgers University, said Harris’s condemnation of the attack on the Golan Heights was “entirely appropriate” but “recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights is not”.
In Australia, Rawan Arraf, the executive director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, quoted Wong’s tweet and said: “Majdal Shams is not an ‘Israeli’ town. It is a Syrian town in the occupied Syrian Golan […] is Australia into recognising annexed illegally occupied territory now? Would that apply to Crimea and eastern Ukraine?”
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