Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Friday morning slammed a United Nations report accusing Israel of violating international law, as part of an ongoing inquiry into alleged rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip following last year’s 11-day fight between Israel and the Hamas terror group.
“Precisely because I was not prime minister at the time of Operation ‘Guardian of the Walls,’ I feel obliged to emphasize: The UN report on the operation is biased, false, inciting and blatantly unbalanced,” Lapid said on Twitter, referencing the 2021 conflict.
“Not all criticism of Israel is antisemitism, but this report was written by antisemites (as Israel has already revealed) and is a distinctly antisemitic report,” he added.
The United Nations’ ongoing Commission of Inquiry released its second report on Thursday, calling on the Security Council to end Israel’s “permanent occupation,” and on individual UN member states to prosecute Israeli officials.
The 28-page document, which will be presented to the General Assembly on October 27, accuses Israel of violating international law by making its control over the West Bank permanent, and by annexing land claimed by the Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and Syrian land in the Golan Heights.
“Actions by Israel constituting de facto annexation include expropriating land and natural resources, establishing settlements and outposts, maintaining a restrictive and discriminatory planning and building regime for Palestinians and extending Israeli law extraterritorially to Israeli settlers in the West Bank,” reads the report.
It also accused Israel of discriminatory policies against Arab citizens, of stealing natural resources and of gender-based violence against Palestinian women.
The commission cited “reasonable grounds” to conclude that Israel’s presence in the West Bank “is now unlawful under international law due to its permanence” as well as the Israeli government’s “de facto annexation policies.”
“By ignoring international law in establishing or facilitating the establishment of settlements, and directly or indirectly transferring Israeli civilians into these settlements, successive Israeli governments have set facts on the ground to ensure permanent Israeli control in the West Bank,” said Navi Pillay, a former UN human rights chief who chairs the commission.
Israel has refused to cooperate with the commission and has not granted it entry into Israel or access to Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank and Gaza.
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