An independent UN commission yesterday said that Israeli attacks on schools, religious and cultural sites in Gaza amount to war crimes and the crime against humanity of seeking to exterminate Palestinians.
“Israel has obliterated Gaza’s education system and destroyed over half of all religious and cultural sites in the Gaza Strip,” the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said in a report.
It accused Israeli forces of committing “war crimes, including directing attacks against civilians and willful killing, in their attacks on educational facilities that caused civilian casualties.”
Photo: Reuters
“In killing civilians sheltering in schools and religious sites, Israeli security forces committed the crime against humanity of extermination,” the report said. “While the destruction of cultural property, including educational facilities, was not in itself a genocidal act, evidence of such conduct may nevertheless infer genocidal intent to destroy a protected group.”
Commission Chair Navi Pillay in a statement accompanying the report said: “We are seeing more and more indications that Israel is carrying out a concerted campaign to obliterate Palestinian life in Gaza.”
“Children in Gaza have lost their childhood,” the senior South African judge said. “They are forced to worry about survival amid attacks, uncertainty, starvation and subhuman living conditions.”
The three-member commission said Israeli attacks “targeted religious sites that served as places of refuge, killing hundreds of people, including women and children.”
The commission was set up by the UN to investigate violations of humanitarian and human rights law in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher last month urged the UN Security Council to take action “to prevent genocide” in Gaza.
Israel has denied committing genocide.
Fletcher demanded that Israel lift its aid blockade on Gaza, where the UN says the entire population of more than 2 million people is at risk of famine.
“For those killed and those whose voices are silenced: what more evidence do you need now?” Fletcher said on May 14. “Will you act — decisively — to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law?”
The UN commission’s report paid special attention to Gaza, but also focused on Israeli attacks on civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories as a whole, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel itself.
It said Israel had “done little” to prevent or prosecute Jewish settlers in the West Bank who “intentionally targeted educational facilities and students to terrorize [Palestinian] communities and force them to leave their homes.”
The report said that Israeli authorities had intimidated and, in some cases, detained Israeli and Palestinian teachers and students who “expressed concern or solidarity with the civilian population in Gaza.”
The commission is to present its findings to the UN Commission on Human Rights on Tuesday next week.
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