UN rights boss regrets Israel dismissal of Gaza killings report
United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said on Wednesday that she regretted Israel’s “immediate dismissal” of a UN report on its forces’ killing Palestinian protesters in Gaza “without addressing any of the very serious issues raised.”
The last week report commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council found Israeli soldiers intentionally fired on civilians and could have committed crimes against humanity in crackdowns that killed 189 people and left more than 6,000 hurt by sniper fire at weekly protests in Gaza last year.
However, Palestinian sources have put the total death toll at 250 people since protesters in Gaza began holding the rallies in March of last year.
“All parties concerned should exercise restraint as the date of March 30 approaches,” Bachelet said, referring to the first anniversary of the protests, in a speech to the UN Human Rights Council, Reuters reported.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week rejected the UN report, saying the UN council “sets new records of hypocrisy.”
During Great March of Return demonstrations, Palestinians demand the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in historical Palestine from which they were driven in 1948 to make way for the Israeli regime.
They also demand an end to Israel’s 12-year blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has gutted the coastal enclave’s economy and deprived its roughly two million inhabitants of many basic commodities.
Also United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has recently said that the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza must be “immediately addressed.”
On February 15, in his address to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Guterres stressed that the two million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip “remain mired in increasing poverty and unemployment, with no access to adequate health, education, water and electricity”, leaving young people with “little prospect of a better future.”