The United Nations General Assembly voted by a wide margin in December to demand Palestinian sovereignty over natural resources under Israeli occupation.
Like numerous other resolutions opposing the occupation, it is unlikely to offer any relief to Palestinians, who continue to be jailed, beaten and killed by military forces and robbed of their lands by settlements.
The resolution was adopted by 164 votes in favour and five against. Predictably, the United States, Canada, Israel and two US neo-colonies - Micronesia and the Marshall Islands - voted against. Australia was among 10 states that abstained.
The vote is the latest in a series of diplomatic salvos from Palestinian Liberation Organisation after decades of failed peace negotiations.
According to the Palestinian Water Authority, 85 percent of water in the occupied territories is allocated to Israeli settlers. The NGO Al Shabaka reported in December that 599,901 Israeli settlers use six times more water than nearly three million Palestinians living in the West Bank.
Accompanying the settlement expansion has been a network of roads, checkpoints and the apartheid wall, which together serve to appropriate more Palestinian land and to leave Palestinians isolated and surrounded. According to a 2013 World Bank report, 68 percent of Area C, which includes the resource-rich Jordan Valley, has been reserved for Israeli settlements, while less than one percent has been allocated for Palestinian use.
The UN resolution comes after a European Parliament resolution, adopted in September, which requires exports from Israeli settlements to be labelled accordingly, rather than mislabelled as "made in Israel", denying such exports preferential trade under the European Union Israel Association Agreement.
The EU resolution, which supposedly allows consumers to make informed decisions regarding the purchase of Israeli settlement products, received a hostile response from Israel, a significant EU trading partner.
However, product labelling falls well short of Palestine solidarity activists' demands for trade sanctions and a military embargo against the apartheid state. Palestinian human rights advocate Omar Barghouti slammed the EU decision.
"Europe remains largely complicit in supporting Israel's occupation and violations of Palestinian rights, despite the empty rhetoric coming from the European Union", he wrote in an article published in Politico on 12 November.
Barghouti noted that the EU, despite its claim to uphold human rights, "maintains a web of military relations, weapons research, banking transactions and settlement trade with Israeli companies, banks and institutions that are deeply implicated in human rights violations".