New Delhi: A panel of experts spoke to the media at UN headquarters in Geneva about a review of Israel’s UN membership in light of it’s genocidal violence in Gaza on December 12. They also called for a halt to direct arms transfers to Israel.
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism, Professor Ben Saul, among the experts at the press conference, said, “Germany and US supply 99% of the weapons exported to Israel. They could stop this conflict overnight if they stopped the weapons that kill Palestinians.”
“My job is to encourage governments to respect human rights while countering terrorism. And I think one of the striking features of the last 14 months is how Israel has used counterterrorism rhetoric to justify exceptional, extreme violence against Palestinians accompanied by a chronic dehumanisation of the Palestinian people.”
He said that Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) has access to good international humanitarian lawyers and are well aware of the illegality of their actions.
“What I find more shocking, in a way, is that I’ve been working on humanitarian law for 25 years, I‘ve cooperated technically with the IDF on many occasions in the past, and I know they have excellent lawyers, very, very good international humanitarian lawyers. So when they unleash a campaign of violence like this, they know what they’re doing. And part of this story, which I don’t think has been explored quite so much, is just how Israel has enabled this violence by taking very extreme exceptional interpretations of international humanitarian law to impose a kind of cloak of legality on what they’re doing. So they’ve expanded the definition of what is a military objective. They’ve expanded the category of people they call fighters who can be attacked.
They impose very large numbers on the civilian casualty counts that they tolerate in targeting. You need the states that matter to bring the pressure to bear on Israel. They could stop this conflict overnight if they stopped the weapons that kill the Palestinians.”
