Israel has demanded the closure of the UN (United Nations) committee investigating crimes committed during the occupation state’s military offensive against Gaza in May last year and called the UN commission ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘Biased’
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid made the demand in a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in which he referred to the statements by Miloon Kothari, a member of the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry, in a media interview.
"We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by, whether it is the Jewish lobby or specific NGOs," Kothari said on a Mondoweiss podcast on 25 July,” Israel PM said.
Referring to Israel, former UN expert Miloon Kothari had said: “I would go so far as to raise the question as why are they even a member of the United Nations.” He referred to the social media reaction to the inquiry controlled by “the Jewish lobby.”
Israel boycotted the Amnesty investigation and prevented the commission’s investigators from entering the apartheid state.
It claimed that the commission’s partial findings in June were "the latest in a series of biased reports."
In his letter to Guterres, Lapid claimed that, "The fight against anti-Semitism cannot be waged with words alone, it requires action. This is the time for action; it is time to disband the Commission. This Commission does not just endorse anti-semitism — it fuels it."
The UN spokesman did not respond immediately to requests for comment, but Mondoweiss published a message from the committee’s chair, Navi Pillay, in which she said that Kothari’s comments were intentionally taken out of context.
The UN report in its first report said Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians.
The investigation details how Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights.
“This includes Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), as well as displaced refugees in other countries. The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law,” reads the report.
“This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention,” the report said.
