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Gaza blockade illegal, must be lifted: U.N.'s Pillay
KAMPALA |
KAMPALA (Reuters) - U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said on Saturday Israel's blockade of Gaza was illegal and should be lifted, and reiterated calls for an investigation into Israel's raid on aid supply ships this week.
"International humanitarian law prohibits starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and...it is also prohibited to impose collective punishment on civilians," Pillay said.
"I have consistently reported to member states that the blockade is illegal and must be lifted."
She said that even if the blockade were proven legal under international law, Israel's military operation against the flotilla on Monday had to be analyzed alongside its obligation to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Israeli forces again seized a ship bound for Gaza on Saturday, boarding the an Irish-owned Rachel Corrie five days after Israeli commandos shot dead nine Turkish activists in a raid on a Turkish aid ship headed for Gaza.
Asked if the UN Security Council should refer the situation in Gaza to the International Criminal Court (ICC), Pillay said the Council had in the past imposed sanctions and referred the situation in Sudan's Darfur region to the ICC.
Pillay, a former ICC judge, was in Kampala to jointly attend a review conference of the court, the world's first permanent war crimes court, and conduct a fact-finding human rights mission in Uganda, one of five 'situations' the ICC is investigating.
(Reporting by Aaron Gray-Block; Editing by Jon Boyle)
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June 5, 2010, 6:20AM
The history of Judaism and the Jewish people is a narrative of not only persecution and achievement but also of forced dispersement around the world to form an amazing diaspora of excellence in many fields, including medicine, physics and chemistry. I and my family, going back many generations to Eastern Europe, are inordinately proud to be Jewish and to have access to such an amazing heritage.
That pride is hugely damaged, today by a profile of Israel as a rogue state that knows only violence to achieve its aims and which has jettisoned any claim to conform to the teachings and ethics of Judaism. It is one that affords me and hundreds of thousands of others – both Jewish and Gentile, deep sadness and shame.
The image of heavily armed Israeli troops shooting unarmed civilians at point blank range, after boarding a Turkish vessel on the high seas, is a terrible indictment of the depths that the Israeli government now plumbs in an effort to control one and a half million souls in Gaza, in complete and utter contempt of world opinion and international law. This is compounded by a report today that one soldier responsible for the killings is to be awarded a medal. Should this report be true, then we can only despair not only at the depths of gratuitous violence but also the contorted thinking of a state acting as a trapped animal that will kill anything or anyone that crosses its path..
This last week has seen Israel-supporting news media, on both sides of the Atlantic, full of bare-faced lies and distortion in regard to the plight of those in Gaza and the food and medicines available. Their protestations fly in the face of the evidence as recorded by the UN and numerous NGOs. There is too little food at affordable prices and insufficient water as a direct result of Israeli government policy not to kill the inhabitants but merely to let them go hungry. They are controlled and restricted at every turn by the extremist Israeli government of Netanyahu and his cohorts who believe they have carte blanche from an AIPAC controlled American administration. Virtually all business in Gaza has collapsed as a direct result of the Israeli policy that sees this as a way of maintaining Israel’s hegemony in the predominately Muslim Middle East.
These are the horrific actions of an Israeli government that pretends to be Jewish and to adhere to Jewish principles but in effect acts as a totalitarian state police machine wielding machine guns and grenades to force the submission of a powerless civilian opposition.
For so long as AIPAC supports such actions, there is little any of us can do to avoid the headlong plunge of the Israeli state into a permanent pariah status.
It is a tragic end to Herzl’s brave dream.
Commenter asserts that Gazans are starving. I haven’t seen one documented proof of that. They are sending the supplies on the ships through after inspecting for arms.
What is galling is the rogue state, that is Israel, expects US unwavering support to maintain its stranglehold over the Palestinians whose only crime is that Israel covet their land.
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