The United Nations Human Rights Counci (UNHRC) yesterday voted to investigate whether Israel committed war crimes during Operation Protective Edge.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the decision as a “travesty.”
The decision today by the UNHRC is a travesty and should be rejected by decent people everywhere.
Rather than investigate Hamas, which is committing a double war crime by firing rockets at Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians, the UNHRC calls for an investigation of Israel, which has gone to unprecedented lengths to keep Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way, including by dropping leaflets, making phone calls and sending text messages.
The UNHRC should be launching an investigation into Hamas’s decision to turn hospitals into military command centers, use schools as weapons depots and place missile batteries next to playgrounds, private homes and mosques.
Another arm of the United Nations, the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), which works exclusively with the Palestinians has been implicated in abetting the human shield strategy of Hamas. After a cache of rockets was found last week at a school run by the UNRWA, the agency returned them to Hamas a few days later.
UN Watch noted that of the 17 special sessions held by the UNHRC since its inception that criticized countries, 7 of them have targeted Israel. In contrast only four special sessions were called regarding Syria.
Hillel Neuer of the Geneva based UN Watch was at the UNHRC proceedings (see embedded video below) and provided a sharp rebuttal to the council. At one point Neuer defended Israel with a statement from the Palestinian ambassador.
In an extraordinary moment of candor, Palestinian Ambassador Ibrahim Khraishi admitted, on Palestinian TV, that “each and every” Palestinian missile launched against Israeli civilians constitutes “a crime against humanity.”
And that, by contrast, Israel’s own response actions in Gaza “followed the legal procedures” because, as Hamas spokespersons admitted on TV, “the Israelis warned them to evacuate their homes before the bombardment; but, “as for the missiles launched from our side, we never warn anyone about where these missiles are about to fall or about the operations we carry out.”
Can any UN entity, or any individual, be truly for human rights when they refuse to say that which was said by the Palestinian ambassador himself?
In The Deep UN: Inside the Secret Infrastructure of Hate that appeared in the May 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine described “a model that institutionalized the hypocritical abuse of the sovereignty principle by elevating the practice of selectively isolating member states because of their internal systems of government—’Zionism’ in the case of Israel.” The UNHRC’s operations fit this description.