UN human rights chief Turk decries latest Israeli strikes
Geneva, Switzerland - The UN human rights chief on Tuesday decried the latest series of Israeli strikes on Gaza killing mostly women and children.
Volker Turk’s remarks came after at least nine children among 16 Palestinians were killed on Sunday in an Israeli bombing targeting several homes east of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
“The latest images of a premature child taken from the womb of her dying mother, of the adjacent two houses where 15 children and five women were killed - this is beyond warfare,” OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani told a UN briefing in Geneva, reading Turk’s statement on the matter.
Turk reiterated such an operation to Rafah would lead to further breaches of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, as well as it would ‘risk more deaths, injuries and displacement on a large scale - even further atrocity crimes, for which those responsible would be held accountable’.
He also said he was ‘horrified’ by the destruction of the Nasser Hospital and Al Shifa Hospital and the discovery of mass graves in and around these locations, calling for ‘independent, effective and transparent’ investigations into the deaths.
On ‘grave human rights violations’ continuing in the occupied West Bank, Turk said that despite international condemnation of massive settler attacks from April 12-14 facilitated by the Israeli Security Forces (ISF), ‘settler violence has continued with the support, protection, and participation of the ISF’.
Asked on the reports that Israel will expand so-called ‘humanitarian zones’ in Gaza ahead of its Rafah ground attack, Shamdasani stressed: “There are no safe places in Gaza and any pretence that creating safe zones is actually dangerous.”
“What we need is an immediate ceasefire,” she reiterated.
Meanwhile, Lebanese group Hezbollah said on Tuesday that it had carried out a drone attack on a military command centre in Acre in northern Israel.