"Yeah, that's right. Israel should stick to all the rules, just like Hamas does."I don't find it amusing that a so called democracy expects it should be judged by the standards of a declared terrorist organization.
https://press.un.org/en/2024/gashc4422.doc.htm
Israel's targeted destruction of healthcare infrastructure in Gaza threatening the long-term survival of Palestinian people as a group are war crimes and crime against humanity, while Palestinian armed groups also committed a war crime by attacking medical staff, facilities and ambulances in Israel, the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) heard today.
“Atrocities committed by one side, do not justify atrocities committed by the other,” said Navi Pillay, Chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel, presenting her report (document A/79/232) documenting attacks on medical facilities and personnel, and the treatment of detainees and hostages from 7 October 2023 to August 2024. She added that the 7 October attacks against Israel and the subsequent escalation of the conflict were preceded by decades of violence and retribution, dispossession, unlawful occupation and denial of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
"7 October should have been a wake-up call to finally end the recurring cycles of violence and retribution, and for peace to become a viable reality," she said, adding: “Tragically, it has instead served as a call to arms for collective punishment and dehumanization.”
She noted that Israel has carried out “hundreds of attacks on hospitals” and “deliberately killed or wounded" hundreds of medical personnel, including "by sniper fire”. These are “the war crimes of willful killing and torture and the crime against humanity of extermination”, she stressed.
The Commission also documented attacks by Palestinian armed groups on medical staff, facilities and ambulances in Israel on and after 7 October 2023, she said, adding that those acts constitute a war crime. She also detailed the situations of the thousands of Palestinian detainees in Israel — arbitrarily detained, “held incommunicado,” and used as human shields by the army during exchanges of fire — as well as the Israeli hostages taken on 7 October, all of whom have been subjected conditions amounting to torture. “Humanity must prevail,” she underscored, calling for an immediate ceasefire, the unconditional release of hostages, an end to the occupation and for the right to self-determination to be realized for Palestinians.
“The devastation inflicted over the past 387 days on the Palestinians […] is an outrage to humanity and everything the post-World War Two international law-based order stands for,” declared Francesca P. Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.
“In a manner reminiscent of other genocides,” the understandable rage and trauma from the brutal 7 October events created a “vengeful atmosphere,” preparing Israeli soldiers to become “willing executioners” in annihilating the Palestinian people, she said. Despite her warning to the Human Rights Council about the risk of genocide in March and a Security Council-ordered ceasefire, the Israeli assault on Gaza has intensified, reducing the Strip to “mass graves from which twisted limbs emerge with signs of IV drips still attached,” she said.
Observing that genocide is a process, including “a plurality of acts and actors,” she said that Israel’s intent to destroy the Palestinian people — “the totality of the Israeli conduct, directed against the totality of the Palestinian people” and the territory Israel illegally occupies — is evidenced by its leaders calling for the destruction of Gaza and its onslaught on the Palestinians, as well as the largest land grab in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 30 years. “This should have been stopped already,” by the Security Council in October 2023 or before Rafah was invaded, she declared, decrying the “silence — or worse — the justification of a small but influential number of States in this room”.
