UN expert accuses Israel of committing genocide

A United Nations expert yesterday delivered a report to the organisation’s Geneva-based Human Rights Council accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and recommending the imposition of an arms embargo.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, opened the detailed 25-page report, Anatomy of a Genocide, by stating: “After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza.”

Israel, which did not attend the session in Geneva, rejected her findings.

The report said more than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 13,000 children, while 12,000 people are missing, presumed dead, and 71,000 have been injured. It says 70 per cent of homes have been destroyed and 80 per cent of the population has been displaced, while thousands have been detained.

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Ms Albanese, an Italian lawyer, has held the post since March 2022 but was refused visas by Israel and officially banned in February this year.

Since 2008, when predecessor Richard Falk was refused entry to Gaza, no UN rapporteur has been granted direct access to occupied Palestinian territories. Ms Albanese relied on UN, international, and state sources for the report.

According to the report, Israel has carried out acts defined as genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention by killing Palestinians, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction” of the population in whole or in part.

The report compared Israel’s “settler-colonial policies” of acquiring indigenous people’s land and resources to treatment of “Native Americans in the US, First Nations in Australia, [and] Herero in Namibia.”

About 1.4 per cent of Gaza’s population has been killed “through lethal weapons and deliberate imposition of threatening conditions,” the report said.

It said Israel has used “25,000 tons of explosives (equivalent to two nuclear bombs) on innumerable buildings, many of which were identified by Artificial Intelligence”. Israel also employed “‘unguided munitions’ and ‘bunker buster’ bombs on densely populated areas and ‘safe zones,’” according to the report.

Israel’s blockade of Gaza is blamed for “death by starvation” and for the “lack of hygiene and overcrowded shelters [which] could cause more deaths than bombings, having created ‘the perfect storm for disease.’” The report predicts “a quarter of Gaza’s population could die from preventable health conditions within a year”.

The report concludes that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel is committing genocide is met. More broadly, [the analyses in the report] indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine”.

Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said the use of the word genocide was “outrageous” and said the war was against Islamist group Hamas and not Palestinian civilians. It was triggered when Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel, killing 1,200 and taking 253 hostages, by Israeli tallies.

“Instead of seeking the truth, this Special Rapporteur tries to fit weak arguments to her distorted and obscene inversion of reality,” it said. – Additional reporting: Reuters

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