Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘intentional attack on civilians’: UN inquiry

New report says Israeli military and Palestinian groups committed war crimes and rights abuses since October 7. As she presented the report to the UN Human Rights Council, Pillay said the Israeli military operating in Gaza “forcibly transferred almost the entire population into a small enclosure that is unsafe and uninhabitable” and used heavy weapons in densely populated areas in “an intentional and direct attack on the civilian population”. “Men and boys experienced specific persecutory acts, including sexual and gender-based violence amounting to torture and inhuman and cruel treatment.” Pillay also noted that the daily onslaught in Gaza must not sideline attention to a parallel wave of violence in the occupied West Bank, where UN human rights chief Volker Turk said on Tuesday the situation is “dramatically deteriorating”. At the @UN Human Rights Council, Navi Pillay, the Chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, reiterated calls for a ceasefire and called for the end of the siege in #Gaza.#HRC56 pic.twitter.com/DYdnvWEGtc — United Nations Human Rights Council 📍 #HRC56 June 19, 2024 She warned the “exploitation of sexual violence in conflict by all parties for political propaganda risks diverting attention from the experience and from the needs of the survivor as well as fuelling longstanding hostilities”. “One is about what happened on October 7 when she says war crimes were committed by Hamas and other Palestinian groups and one about what happened to Palestinians in Gaza after October 7, where she says there were war crimes by the Israelis.” Pillay told Al Jazeera it was “tragic” that Israel has prevented the commission from visiting victims inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.