GENEVA, Switzerland —
Israel’s occupation and discrimination against
Palestinians are the main causes of the endless cycles of violence, UN
investigators said Tuesday, prompting angry Israeli protests.
اضافة اعلان
A high-level
team of investigators, appointed last year by the
UN Human Rights Council to
probe “all underlying root causes” in the decades-long conflict, pointed the
finger squarely at Israel.
“Ending the
occupation of lands by Israel ... remains essential in ending the persistent
cycles of violence,” they said in a report, decrying ample evidence that Israel
has “no intention” of doing so.
The 18-page
report mainly focuses on evaluating a long line of past UN investigations,
reports, and rulings on the situation, and how and if those findings were
implemented.
Recommendations
in past reports were “overwhelmingly directed towards Israel,” lead
investigator Navi Pillay, a former UN rights chief from South Africa, said in a
statement.
This, she said,
was “an indicator of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the reality of
one state occupying the other”.
The
investigators also determined that those recommendations “have overwhelmingly
not been implemented”, she said, pointing to calls to ensure accountability for
Israel’s violations of international law but also “indiscriminate firing of
rockets” by
Palestinian armed groups into Israel.
“It is this lack
of implementation coupled with a sense of impunity, clear evidence that Israel
has no intention of ending the occupation, and the persistent discrimination
against Palestinians that lies at the heart of the systematic recurrence of
violations in both the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East
Jerusalem, and Israel.”
‘Witch hunt’
Israel has refused to cooperate with the
Commission of Inquiry (COI)
created last year following the 11-day Israeli war on Gaza in May 2021, which
killed 260 Palestinians, 67 of whom were children.
Israel has in the
past loudly criticized Pillay for “championing an anti-Israel agenda”, and on
Tuesday the foreign ministry slammed the entire investigation as “a witch
hunt”.
The report, it
said, was “one-sided” and “tainted with hatred for ... Israel and based on a long
series of previous one-sided and biased reports.”
It had been
published, it said, as “the result of the
Human Rights Council’s extreme
anti-Israel bias.”
The US, a
staunch ally of Israel — which rejoined the council under President Joe Biden,
after Donald Trump withdrew from the body — reiterated that it “firmly” opposes
the “open-ended and vaguely defined nature” of the COI.
“The existence
of this COI in its current form is a continuation of a long-standing pattern of
unfairly singling out Israel,” US State Department spokesman
Ned Price said in
a statement.
In Geneva,
dozens of Israeli reserve soldiers and students — some of them dressed like
Palestinian Hamas fighters — marched Tuesday outside the UN headquarters in
protest.
Nitsana
Darshan-Leitner, who heads the Israeli NGO Shurat Hadin that organized the
protest, slammed the rights council as “the most anti-Semitic body in the
world”.
Israel and its
allies have long accused the top UN rights body of anti-Israel bias, pointing
among other things to the fact that Israel is the only country that is
systematically discussed at every regular council session, with a dedicated
special agenda item.
The COI, which
is the highest-level investigation that can be ordered by the council, is the
ninth probe it has ordered into rights violations in Palestinian territories.
It is the first,
however, tasked with looking at systematic abuses committed within Israel, the
first open-ended probe, and the first to examine “root causes” in the drawn-out
conflict.
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