Israel on Thursday considered “ridiculous” a United Nations report on “serious human rights violations” committed by the Israeli armed forces and illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank.
“Pretty ridiculous,” Tal Heinrich, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, said at a news conference in Jerusalem.
The report, he added, shows facts known to the Israeli Government, such as that “Palestinians are arming” teenagers to confront the Israeli army.
The spokesperson criticized the document for not taking into account the threats faced by Israeli forces in areas of the occupied West Bank, such as Judea and Samaria, where they work to “keep this front as calm as possible.”
Heinrich added that the Islamist group Hamas and Islamic Jihad have bases in the area, blaming both movements for the disruption to Palestinians’ daily lives attributed to Israeli army checkpoints.
Regarding the attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian citizens, Heinrich stated that they reveal “a significant decline in an almost marginal phenomenon.”
Netanyahu has argued that no one can take the law into their own hands and that those who violate the law will be judged regardless of their religious or political beliefs.
In a report released in the Swiss city of Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Office on Thursday called on Israel to “end the illegal killings” of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, where soldiers and settlers have killed 300 people since The Start of the war with Hamas, on October 7.
In the document, the UN called for an end to the “use of military weapons in police operations in the West Bank” and also called on Israel to end “arbitrary detentions and ill-treatment of Palestinians, and to lift discriminatory practices.” “It restricts circulation.”
All these practices “are extremely worrying,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a statement, quoted by the France-Presse news agency (AFP).
Israel declared war on Hamas after the Islamist group launched an unprecedented attack on Israeli soil on October 7 from the Gaza Strip.
The attack caused around 1,200 deaths and Hamas commandos also took 240 hostages and took them to the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli authorities.
Since then, Israel has attacked Gaza by air, land and sea, in an operation to annihilate Hamas that has so far caused more than 21,000 deaths, according to the Islamist group.
The conflict also spread to southern Lebanon, with exchanges of fire between Israelis and militants of the Lebanese Hezbollah party, controlled by Iran, and to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
According to the UN, cited by the Spanish agency EFE, of the 300 fatalities in the West Bank recorded between October 7 and December 27, 291 were murdered by Israeli security forces and the rest by settlers.
Settlers sometimes act in the company of Israeli security forces or wear so-called Israeli security uniforms themselves, the UN said in the report.
According to the UN, Israeli forces detained more than 4,700 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including 40 journalists, and often subjected them to ill-treatment.
“The abuses documented in the report echo the patterns and nature of past abuses committed in the context of Israel’s long-standing occupation of the West Bank, but the intensity of current violence and repression has not been seen in years,” Turk commented. . .
The high commissioner also called on Israel to “take immediate, clear and effective measures” to end violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, called for incidents committed by settlers and Israeli forces to be investigated, and for Israel to “ensure the protection of Palestinian communities against any form of forced displacement”.
Turk also called on Israel to allow UN access to the country, saying he is willing to produce similar reports on the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7 that sparked the current conflict.
Source: TSF
