A group of UN experts* decried Israel’s escalation of its genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza, while calling on the international community to end its complicity in the face of Israeli atrocities as ceasefire talks continue without progress.
“Displacement orders from the Israeli authorities have targeted the last vestiges of the international humanitarian response in Gaza, as have direct attacks like the recent deadly airstrike on the Palestine Red Crescent Society,” the experts said, Thursday.
“This comes as the people of Gaza – above all, children – are dying en masse of starvation coupled with a lack of access to food, water, healthcare and shelter,” they said. “So-called ‘humanitarian pauses’ and airdrops are insufficient to address a crisis of this scale. Unrestricted and uninterrupted humanitarian assistance must be allowed into Gaza.”
The experts stressed that Israel’s illegal restrictions on humanitarian aid have inflicted conditions of life on the people of Gaza that are currently bringing about their physical destruction. They recalled this constitutes an act punishable under international law as genocide, as does the mass killing and maiming of Palestinians in Gaza.
“Israel is exterminating the people of Gaza by any and all means,” the experts said. “Over a thousand Palestinians have been slaughtered by Israeli forces as they line up for humanitarian assistance.”
Seventy per cent of these killings have taken place at sites established by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, backed by the United States and Israel. These deaths add to the more than 59,000 Palestinians killed and 140,000 injured during Israel’s indiscriminate assault on Gaza.
The experts warned that displacement orders have confined Gaza’s entire surviving population to a mere 12 per cent of the Strip’s territory.
“Israeli proposals to further forcibly transfer Gaza’s population to a so-called ‘humanitarian city’ on the border with Egypt can only be seen as an attempt to create a concentration camp with conditions so dire that Gazans will ultimately be forced from their homeland,” they said.
The experts urged the international community to take long-overdue measures to protect Palestinians and hold Israel accountable.
“Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people is enabled by the complicity of States that continue to shield Israel from the political and diplomatic consequences of its actions – choosing instead to suppress the free speech of their own citizens who speak out against these horrendous crimes while continuing to provide Israel with arms, trade, and economic assistance,” they said.
“Furthermore, the United Nations has yet to definitively refer to the situation in Gaza as a genocide, despite irrefutable evidence of Israel committing multiple prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention and public statements from Israel’s leadership calling for the continued starvation of Gaza,” the experts said.
They also noted that the European Union has failed to adopt any measures to sanction Israel for breaching its human rights obligations under the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
“Without urgent international action, the words ‘never again’ will refer not to the prevention of genocide, but to the existence of Palestinian life in Gaza,” the experts said.
*The experts:
The Special Rapporteurs/Independent Experts/Working Groups are independent human rights experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Together, these experts are referred to as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. While the UN Human Rights office acts as the secretariat for Special Procedures, the experts serve in their individual capacity and are independent from any government or organization, including OHCHR and the UN. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the UN or OHCHR.
Country-specific observations and recommendations by the UN human rights mechanisms, including the special procedures, the treaty bodies and the Universal Periodic Review, can be found on the Universal Human Rights Index https://uhri.ohchr.org/en/
UN Human Rights, country page – https://www.ohchr.org/en/countries/israel
For inquiries and media requests, please contact: Krishnan Raghavan, Human Rights Officer ([email protected])
For media inquiries related to other UN independent experts please contact Maya Derouaz ([email protected]) or Dharisha Indraguptha ([email protected])
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