A summit in Istanbul of Muslim heads of state on Friday urged the creation of an international force to protect the Palestinians, as host Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel of “brutality” comparable to the Nazis.
The 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — seeking to bridge severe differences within the Muslim world — claimed in a final communique that Israel had carried out the “wilful murder” of some 60 Palestinians on the Gaza border during Monday’s violent clashes there.
It called “for the international protection of the Palestinian population, including through dispatching of an international protection force.”
Erdogan said sending such an “international peacekeeping force” was essential to help the Palestinians and stop the international community being a “spectator to massacres.” He compared such a force to the UN forces sent to deal with the aftermath of the Balkan wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Many in the international community have criticized Israel for the deaths, while the IDF and Hamas have both noted that many of the dead were members of Gazan terror groups. A Hamas official, Salah Bardawil, said Wednesday that 50 of the fatalities were Hamas members.
The OIC call echoed that by Kuwait, the Arab representative on the UN Security Council, which on Friday called to deploy an international force in Gaza to protect civilians.
A draft resolution circulated by the Arab nation demanded that Israel “immediately cease its military reprisals, collective punishment and unlawful use of force against civilians, including in the Gaza Strip.”
No date was set for the draft to be put to a vote. Israel has rejected the resolution’s demands, with Ambassador Danny Danon saying “The cynicism and attempts to distort reality have reached a new low. Israel will continue to defend its sovereignty and the security of its citizens against the terror and murderous violence of Hamas.”
The UN Human Rights Council on Friday voted to establish an investigation into Israel’s killing of Palestinians during protests along the Gaza border, in a move Israel rejected as being an attempt to undermine Israel’s right to self-defense.
The council voted 29 in favor and two against with 14 countries abstaining. Australia and the US were the two countries to oppose the decision. The council also condemned “the disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force by the Israeli occupying forces against Palestinian civilians.”
The “independent, international commission of inquiry” mandated by the council will be asked to produce a final report next March.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the vote and the council as “irrelevant.”
“The organization that calls itself the Human Rights Council again proved it is a hypocritical and biased body whose purpose is to harm Israel and back terror, but mostly it proved it is irrelevant,” he added. “The State of Israel will continue to defend its citizens and soldiers,” he said.
Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said Israel would not cooperate with the investigation.
“The UN Human Rights Council prefers to back Hamas instead of supporting Israel’s right to defend itself from terror,” tweeted Hotovely. “We have no intention of cooperating with an international investigative committee that wants to dictate results without a connection to facts.”
Israel accused the council of systematically ignoring real human rights violations around the world and instead “adopting for more resolutions against Israel than against all the rest of the countries in the world combined.”
Israel pointed out that the vast majority of the 60 people killed in Monday’s protest “were Hamas members, as even the leaders of the terror group have acknowledged in their own voices.”
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