An Israeli military convoy moves inside the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, as seen from Israel, June 17, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
The United Nations Human Rights Office on Wednesday published a report accusing Israel of carrying out several indiscriminate military strikes against Palestinians in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the latest effort by the international organization to target the Jewish state.
In the report, the organization outlines six instances in which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) allegedly struck heavily-populated areas in the Gaza strip without sufficient concern for civilian well-being. The six strikes highlighted by the report took place between October and December 2023 and targeted residential buildings, markets, refugee camps, and schools.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication. However, Hamas has in many cases prevented people from leaving, according to the IDF.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’ widely recognized military strategy of embedding themselves within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
Nonetheless, the UN report called on Israel to conduct investigations into the purported violation of international human rights laws (IHL), alleging that some members of the IDF might bear “criminal responsibility” for recklessly killing Palestinian civilians.
“The requirement to select means and methods of warfare that avoid or at the very least minimize to every extent civilian harm appears to have been consistently violated in Israel’s bombing campaign,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement.
The UN office asserts that the Jewish state has not been cautious enough in trying to spare innocent life, claiming, “Israel’s choices of methods and means of conducting hostilities in Gaza since 7 October, including the use of explosive weapons with wide area effects in densely populated areas, have failed to ensure that they effectively distinguish between civilians and combatants.”
“The widespread, large- scale and continuing toll of civilian deaths, notably the high proportion of women and children amongst them, and accompanying destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza since 7 October, raise serious concerns about the Israeli Defense Forces’ compliance with IHL,” the report continues.
The proportion of women and children killed in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas has substantially declined since October, according to findings by the Associated Press. Women and children accounted for more than 60 percent of the casualties in Gaza in October, the AP found. In April that number plunged below 40 percent, indicating shifting military tactics by the IDF.
The AP noted that the decreasing share of children among casualties “went unnoticed for months by the UN and much of the media, and the Hamas-linked Health Ministry has made no effort to set the record straight.” Most prominent media outlets get their Gaza casualty figures from Hamas-controlled health authorities. Experts have cast doubt on the reliability of their numbers.
On the same day that the new report was released, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) issued public statements condemning Israel for “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” “extermination,” “murder,” “starvation,” and “gender prosecution targeting Palestinian men and boys.”
The UNHRC claimed that Israel cut off humanitarian assistance to Gaza, without noting that Hamas terrorists often attempt to steal and hoard aid or that Israel has allowed large numbers of supply trucks to enter the war-torn enclave.
Still, the UNHRC accused Israel of causing “grave harm to children, including starvation-related deaths.”
The Famine Review Committee, a panel of the United Nation’s own experts, issued a report earlier this month refuting the assertion that Gaza is suffering through a famine.
The UNHRC then decried the substantial number of men among the “civilian casualties” in Gaza while not acknowledging that many of them are Hamas militants.
The office’s demand that Israel not target adult men would seemingly make the IDF’s objective of dismantling Hamas nearly impossible. The UNHRC’s outrage over the disproportionate amount of adult male casualties in Gaza would also seemingly contradicts its insistence that Israel has disproportionately endangered the lives of women and children during the conflict.
Israeli officials have long accused the UN of having a bias against the Jewish state. Last year, the UN General Assembly condemned Israel twice as often as it did all other countries. Meanwhile, of all the country-specific resolutions passed by the UNHRC, nearly half have condemned Israel, a seemingly disproportionate focus on the lone democracy in the Middle East.
Weeks following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, the UN adopted a resolution calling for a “ceasefire” between Israel and the terrorist group. The UN failed to pass a measure condemning the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7.
Earlier this month, the UN put Israel on its so-called “list of shame” of countries that kill children in armed conflict. Israel is considered to be the only democracy on the list.
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