Israel formally announces it will not cooperate with UNHRC probe of alleged abuses against Palestinian Arabs.
Israel on Thursday formally announced it would not cooperate with a special commission formed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate alleged abuses against Palestinian Arabs, The Associated Press reported.
The decision was conveyed in a scathing letter to the commission’s head, Navi Pillay, signed by Meirav Eilon Shahar, Israel’s ambassador to the UN and international organizations in Geneva.
“It is obvious to my country, as it should be to any fair-minded observer, that there is simply no reason to believe that Israel will receive reasonable, equitable and non-discriminatory treatment from the Council, or from this Commission of Inquiry,” said the letter.
“This COI is sure to be yet another sorry chapter in the efforts to demonize the State of Israel,” Eilon Shahar wrote in the letter.
Her letter took personal aim at Pillay and noted that she has endorsed “the shameful libel” branding Israel an apartheid nation and backed the boycott movement against Israel.
This past July, the president of the UN Human Rights Council announced that Pillay will chair a commission to investigate what was described as “systematic” abuses allegedly committed in Israel and Palestinian Authority territories during the recent violence between Hamas and Israel last May.
Pillay has a history of anti-Israel statements. In 2014, she condemned Israel for “targeting” UN-run schools and hospitals in Gaza, while failing to mention three UN-run schools in Gaza had been used as rocket warehouses, a gross violation of international law that clearly falls within the category of war crimes.
Weeks before that, Pillay opened an emergency UN debate on Gaza by saying there is a “strong possibility” that Israel is violating law in Gaza, and that could amount to war crimes.
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