UN investigators said on Tuesday that Israeli occupation and discrimination against Palestinians are the main causes of the endless cycle of violence that has fueled angry Israeli protests.
A high-level team of investigators appointed last year by the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate “all underlying root causes” in the decades-long conflict pointed the finger at Israel thoroughly.
“Ending Israel’s occupation of the land … is necessary to end the continuing cycle of violence,” he said in a report, adding that there is substantial evidence that Israel is “to do so”. No intention”.
Israel has in the past criticized principal investigator Navi Pillay for “championing an anti-Israeli agenda”, and on Tuesday the Foreign Ministry dismissed the entire investigation as “a witch hunt”.
The report, it said, was one-sided and “based on a long series of previous one-sided and partisan reports tainted by hatred for the state of Israel.”
It was published, it said, “as a result of the Human Rights Council’s extreme anti-Israeli bias.”
The 18-page report focused primarily on evaluating a long line of UN investigations, reports and decisions on the situation, and how and if those findings were implemented.
Pillay, South Africa’s former UN rights chief, said in a statement the recommendations in previous reports were “highly directed toward Israel”.
This, she said, was “an indicator of the heterogeneous nature of the conflict and the reality of one state occupying another.”
Investigators also determined that those recommendations were “not heavily implemented,” she said, pointing to Israel’s calls to ensure accountability for violations of international law, but not for Palestinian armed groups in Israel. Also by “indiscriminate firing of rockets”.
“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 who are in violation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Systematic repetition is at the center, including East Jerusalem and Israel.”
Israel refused to cooperate with the Commission of Inquiry (COI) created last year after the 11-day Hamas-Israel war in May 2021, which killed 260 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.
The United States, a staunch ally of Israel, which rejoined the council under President Joe Biden after the withdrawal of Donald Trump from the body, reiterated that it strongly adhered to the “open and vaguely defined nature” of the COI. opposes.
“The existence of this COI in its current form is a continuation of a long-standing pattern of unfairly isolating Israel,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.
In Geneva, dozens of Israeli Reserve soldiers and students, some of them dressed as Palestinian Hamas terrorists, marched outside the UN headquarters in protest on Tuesday.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the head of the Israeli NGO Shurat Hadin, which organized the protest, slammed the Council of Rights as “the most anti-Semitic body in the world”.
Israel and its allies have long accused the UN’s top rights body of anti-Israeli bias, pointing among other things to the fact that Israel is the only country to have a dedicated special session at every regular council session. With agenda items systematically discussed.
The COI, the highest-level inquiry that can be ordered by the Council, is the ninth investigation ordered into rights violations in the Palestinian territories.
It is, however, the first, tasked with looking into systematic abuses within Israel, the first open investigation, and the first to investigate the “root causes” in the drawn out conflict.
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