UN investigators accused Israel, today, Thursday, of deliberately targeting health facilities in Gaza, and killing and torturing medical workers, considering that it committed crimes against humanity.
The UN International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel said in a statement: “Israel implemented a coordinated policy to destroy the health care system in Gaza, as part of a broader attack on Gaza.”
It added that Israel committed “war crimes and a crime against humanity, consisting of genocide through continuous and deliberate attacks on medical workers and medical facilities.”
The three-member Commission, established by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021 to investigate possible violations of international law in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, published its second report since the start of the war a year ago.
The report also highlights the mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel and hostages in Gaza, accusing Israel and Palestinian factions
of ‘torture,’ sexual violence, and gender-based violence.
‘Israel must immediately cease its indiscriminate and unprecedented destruction of health facilities in Gaza,’ said the committee’s chair, Navi Pillay, the former UN Human Rights Chief, in a statement.
This constitutes ‘a direct attack on the right to health, with significant and long-term negative consequences for the civilian population,’ she added.
The report also concluded that Israeli forces ‘deliberately killed, detained, and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles’ in Gaza, and restricted permits to leave the territory for medical treatment.
The Commission said such actions constituted multiple war crimes, and ‘the crime against humanity of genocide’ was also involved.
It added that Israel had inflicted ‘incalculable suffering’ on child patients and ‘deliberately imposed living conditions designed to destroy generations of Palestinian children, and potentially the Palestinian people as a collective.’
The report highlighted
the killing of the child Hind Rajab in January as “one of the most horrific cases”.
Hind contacted the Palestinian Red Crescent, begging for her rescue, after her family’s car was shot at in Gaza City.
Her body was eventually found, along with six of her relatives, and two Red Crescent rescue workers, who were sent to search for her.
The Commission said it had concluded that the Israeli army’s 162nd Division was responsible for their killing, which constitutes a war crime.
In a related context, the government media office in Gaza warned on Thursday of the catastrophic repercussions of the Israeli army targeting the health sector, especially in the Gaza and North governorates, stressing that “the occupation is thus seeking to complete the crime of genocide”.
The Director General of the media office, Ismail Al-Thawabtah, said that “the Israeli occupation is seeking to complete the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people by targeting these sectors, most notably the health sector and destroying hosp
itals”.
Source: National Iraqi News Agency