On Thursday, at a special session of the UN Human Human Rights Council called at the request of Pakistan (on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation) and Palestine, the United Nations human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, said that the constant bombing of Gaza by the Israeli forces might constitute ‘war crimes.’
Bachelet opened a special session of the UNHRC and raised her concern regarding the ‘high level of civilian fatalities and injuries from the attacks which left 253 Palestinians dead. She said that she had seen no evidence to support that the civilian buildings, including the medical facilities and media houses destroyed by the Israeli forces in Gaza, were being used for military purposes.
“Despite Israel’s claims that many of these buildings were hosting armed groups or being used for military purposes, we have not seen evidence in this regard,” she said.
“If found to be indiscriminate and disproportionate in their impact on civilians and civilian objects, such attacks may constitute war crimes,” Bachelet said. She also said that the rockets fired by Hamas were indiscriminate as they failed to “distinguish between military and civilian objects.
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The 11 days of ceaseless bombardment, which began during Ramadan, left 253 Palestinians, including 66 children, dead and around 1,900 people injured. At the same time, the Hamas rockets claimed 12 lives in Israel. The bombing stopped after an Egypt-backed ceasefire last Friday.
“Although reportedly targeting members of armed groups and their military infrastructure, the Israeli attacks resulted in extensive civilian deaths and injuries, as well as large-scale destruction and damage to civilian objects,” said the UN rights chief.
“There is no doubt that Israel has the right to defend its citizens and residents,” she said. “However, Palestinians have rights too. The same rights.”
At the rights council, the 47-member council was debating a draft resolution to launch a broad, international investigation into violations surrounding the latest violence and “systematic” abuses in the Palestinian territories and inside Israel.
This draft resolution calls for an unprecedented level of scrutiny on abuses and their “root causes” in the decades-long Middle East conflict. The proposal presented by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation calls for the council to “urgently establish an ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry… in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel”.
The investigators, the text said, should probe “all alleged violations and abuses” of international law linked to the tensions that sparked the latest violence, but also “underlying root causes of recurrent tensions and instability, including systematic discrimination and repression based on group identity.”
The investigation should focus on establishing facts and gathering evidence that could be used in legal proceedings and should try to identify perpetrators to ensure they are held accountable.
Muna El-Kurd, an activist and journalist from the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood Sheikh Jarrah, was one of the various speakers addressing the session. “We don’t want just your concern; we want you to stop this ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah and in Palestine,” she said.
Meirav Eilon Shahar, Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, slammed the session and the draft text and claimed that they were yet another example of the council’s bias against Israel.
The Palestinian Foreign Minister, Riyad al-Maliki, hit back at that claim, telling the council, “we refuse to equate between the colonizer and the colonized.”
He said that the failure of the international community to hold Israel accountable for its crimes has only served to encourage it to continue committing them.
He accused Israel of instituting “an apartheid system based on the forced displacement of our people.” He added, “the right to self-defense and the right to resist occupation is a right we have as the Palestinian people.”
“There can be no peace without the end of Israeli occupation,” said the Palestinian Authority.