The UN’s top human rights official again condemned Israel for its military actions to stop Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, accusing the Jewish state of “deliberately defying International Law… in a way that may constitute war crimes.”
Navi Pillay told reporters following yet another “emergency” meeting of the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council that Israel was not doing enough to protect civilians. “There is a strong possibility,” said the known Israel critic, “that international law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes.”
Among the UN’s long bill of particulars against the beleaguered Jewish state comes the almost unbelievable accusation that Israel’s refusal to share its Iron Dome ballistic missile defense shield with the “governing authority” of Gaza – i.e. Hamas, the terror group created to pursue the extermination of the Jewish state and now waging a terrorist war against it – constitutes a war crime against the civilians of Gaza.
The UN chairwoman criticized the U.S. for helping fund Israel’s Iron Dome system which has saved countless Israeli and Palestinian lives. “No such protection has been provided to Gazans against the shelling,” she said.
Just because Hamas fires rockets indiscriminately aimed at Israeli civilian population centers without provocation and fires them from within its own population centers does not “absolve” Israel from its own legal violations, Pillay told reporters Thursday.
Marking the end of her contentious, six-year term as chairman of the notoriously anti-Israel UNHRC, Pillay saved her harshest condemnations for what she termed Israeli “targeting” of UN-run schools and hospitals in Gaza. She did not mention, nor was she reminded by any of the reporters present, that as of this writing, at least three UN-run schools in Gaza have been used as rocket warehouses, a gross violation of international law that clearly falls within the category of war crimes. Neither did she mention, nor was she reminded, that in at least two of the three cases cited above, the terror rockets found on UN property in Gaza were returned to Hamas by the UN.
“What I’m seeing now is a recurrence of the very acts that the Gaza fact-finding mission indicated as constituting war crimes and crimes against humanity,” she said.
The UN’s Human Rights Council has long been a source of deep embarrassment to some UN supporters all-too-conscious that the council is widely regarded as a cesspool of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred, manipulated by the world’s very worst human rights abusers to cover up their own gross abuses of human rights by scapegoating Israel.
Current members of the UN Human Rights Council include China, Russia, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. Iran and North Korea have been recent active members of the body. So execrable were the actions and abuses of the UNHRC in the past that the body was in fact disbanded in 2006 after the late terrorist leader of Libya Muammar Gaddafi was elected President of the Council.
While Israel is the only country in the world that remains a standing agenda item at every session, the human rights body has to date said nothing about the recent Russian-backed shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, nor has it condemned the ongoing mass killings in Syria or South Sudan. North Korea, China, Pakistan, Syria, Sudan, or Iran, all recent or current members of the council, have never been condemned by it.
The UNHRC has never formally mentioned “Hamas” by name, let alone condemned it.
From 2006 through 2012, Israel was formally condemned by the UNHRC at least 47 times.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.