NEW YORK(National times)- While describing sexual violence as a weapon of war and a tool to consolidate illegal occupation of territories, Pakistan has drawn the attention of the international community to the plight of women in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) and Palestine where sexual violence has been deployed to punish and humiliate communities. Delivering a national statement at the UN Security Council Annual Open Debate on “Conflict-Related Sexual Violence” on Wednesday, Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN, highlighted the gravity and acuteness of the problem in situations of foreign occupation such as in IIOJK and Palestine. He said that the full scale of the systematic repression and abuse is often masked by lack of transparency, access and reporting, and immunity laws shield occupying forces from accountability in such situations. “These cases must not escape international scrutiny. They demand urgent attention from the Council and the SRSG’s office,” he said. Ambassador Asim said that a glaring example of such violations is in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where hundreds of thousands of people are facing violence, forced displacement and starvation at the hand of the occupying power, Israel. He said that despite the limited access granted to UN monitors in Palestine, the Secretary General’s report has documented incidents of rape, sexual violence, prolonged forced nudity and repeated strip searches inflicted in degrading ways. Referring to the human rights violations in IIOJK, he said that there is documented evidence of Indian occupation forces using rape as a means of targeting women – who demand self-determination, or support and sympathise with those struggling for their inalienable right that has been guaranteed to them – by this Council in its multiple resolutions on Jammu and Kashmir. He referred to the 2018 and 2019 reports of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, as well as by international media, civil society and international human rights organizations and stated that this ongoing violence and abuse has been corroborated over the years. He said that according to one recent report, close to 10,000 women and girls have gone missing in the Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir between 2019 and 2021 alone. “We, therefore, call on the SRSG to also pay attention to this situation,” he demanded.