The UN human rights chief yesterday decried allegations of serious rights violations in the Israel-Hamas war and suggested an international investigation was needed.
“Extremely serious allegations of multiple and profound breaches of international humanitarian law, whoever commits them, demand rigorous investigation and full accountability,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said.
Turk was speaking after a visit last week to the Middle East, where he warned that both sides were committing war crimes in the deadly conflict.
Photo:EPA-EFE
“Where national authorities prove unwilling or unable to carry out such investigations, and where there are contested narratives on particularly significant incidents, international investigation is called for,” he said in a briefing to UN member states in Geneva.
It was vital for his office to access the Palestinian territories “to ensure full and independent monitoring and documentation and to coordinate the protection work,” he told reporters later.
Turk said he had “asked Israel to give me access both to Israel, but also to the occupied Palestinian territory. I have not yet received a response.”
He urged an immediate ceasefire and called on all parties to acknowledge the equal value of all human lives.
“It is apparent that on both sides, some view the killing of civilians as either acceptable collateral damage, or a deliberate and useful weapon of war,” he said.
He also insisted that “the Israeli occupation must end.”
“Israelis’ freedom is inextricably bound up with Palestinians’ freedom. Palestinians and Israelis are each others’ only hope for peace,” Turk said.
Israel harshly criticized UN attempts to balance criticism about violations, insisting that international law was “not a suicide pact.”
Meanwhile, Israeli forces dropped leaflets warning Palestinians to flee parts of southern Gaza, residents said yesterday, signaling a possible expansion of their offensive to areas where hundreds of thousands of people who heeded earlier evacuation orders are crowded into UN-run shelters and family homes.
Israeli soldiers continued searching al-Shifa Hospital in the north, in a raid that began early on Wednesday. They displayed guns they say were found hidden in one building, but have yet to release any evidence of the central Hamas command center that Israel has said is concealed beneath the complex. Hamas and staff at the hospital, Gaza’s largest, deny the allegations.
Broadening operations to the south — where Israel already carries out daily air raids — threatens to worsen an already severe humanitarian crisis in the besieged territory. More than 1.5 million people have been internally displaced in Gaza, with most having fled to the south, where food, water and electricity are increasingly scarce.
It is not clear where else they could go, as Egypt refuses to allow a mass transfer onto its soil.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid has called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step down “immediately,” without waiting until the end of the country’s war against the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
“Netanyahu should leave immediately... We need change, Netanyahu cannot remain prime minister,” Lapid said on Wednesday in an interview with Israeli news channel N12.
“We cannot allow ourselves to carry out a long campaign under a prime minister who has lost the people’s trust,” he added.
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