Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said that the US Administrations declaration of withdrawal from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention “reaffirms its contempt for international law and the law-based international order.” Maliki accused the administration of President Donald Trump of “deliberately sabotaging and destroying the international system because of its insistence on continuing to support the Israeli colonial project relentlessly… thus adopting this hostile agenda at the expense of international cooperation and the protection of international standards.” On Wednesday, US National Security Adviser John Bolton announced that his country would withdraw from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention, stressing that “it relates to the complaint of the so-called State of Palestine against the United States, in defiance of the transfer of our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.” “I would like to stress that the United States remains a party to the Vienna Basic Treaty on Diplomatic Relations and we expect all parties to respect their international obligations under the Treaty,” Bolton said, adding that the United States would review all international agreements that could expose it to binding decisions by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Last week, Palestine filed a lawsuit against the United States at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for moving its embassy to the occupied city of Jerusalem. Palestine brought the case before the main judicial organ of the United Nations because of the United States’ violation of international law. In a statement, Maliki said that the case was based on Palestine’s membership in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations that defines a framework for diplomatic relations between independent countries, specifically the Optional Protocol concerning the Compulsory Settlement of Disputes. In this regard, Dr. Omar Awadallah, head of the United Nations Department at the Palestinian foreign ministry, told Asharq Al-Awsat that when the United States received the lawsuit, it was still a member of the Optional Protocol, “so its withdrawal now does not make a difference.” Member of the PLO Executive Committee, Hanan Ashrawi, described the recent US move as an attack against the international system. She said that the repeated withdrawal of the United States from international bodies would lead to its isolation and put in direct confrontation with the freedom of the Palestinians and their right to self-determination.