UN human rights chief says Gaza situation is ‘carnage’

The UN’s human rights chief has described the situation in Gaza as “carnage” and said that war crimes had been committed by all parties in the conflict.

Addressing a meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said there were “no words to capture, the horrors that are unfolding before our eyes in Gaza”.

He said that 100,000 people had been killed or wounded since early October.

“Let me repeat that, about one in every 20 children, women, and men, are now dead or wounded,” he told the Human Rights Council.

He said at least 17,000 children were orphaned or separated from their families, while many more “carry the scars of physical and emotional trauma life-long”.

“Today, the total number of people killed has exceeded 30,000 and tens of thousands of people are missing, many presumed buried under the rubble of their homes,” he said.

Mr Turk described the attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas on 7 October as “shocking,” “profoundly traumatising and totally unjustifiable”.

He said the killing of civilians, reports of torture and sexual violence inflicted by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, and the holding of hostages since that time, were “appalling and entirely wrong.”

“And so is the brutality of the Israeli response,” he said.

He described “the unprecedented level of killing and maiming of civilians in Gaza, including UN staff and journalists, the catastrophic humanitarian crisis caused by restrictions on humanitarian aid, the displacement of at least three-quarters of the population, often multiple times, the massive destruction of hospitals and other civilian infrastructure and in many cases, systematic demolition of entire neighbourhoods, rendering Gaza largely unliveable”.

Mr Turk said that before this conflict he had described the situation across the Occupied Palestinian Territory as “dire”.

He said that in 56 years of Israeli occupation, “profoundly discriminatory systems of control were imposed on Palestinians to restrict their rights, including the right to movement, with major impact on their equality, housing, health, work, education and family life”.

He said a 16-year-long blockade of Gaza kept most of its 2.2 million people “effectively in captivity and destroyed the local economy”.

He said the situation was “incomparably worse”.

Mr Turk said that the launching by Palestinian armed groups of indiscriminate projectiles across southern Israel, and as far as Tel Aviv, violated international humanitarian law, as does the continued holding of hostages.

“I have met with some of the hostages’ families, and I feel their pain,” he said.

Mr Turk said that the blockade and siege imposed on Gaza amounted to “collective punishment, and may also amount to the use of starvation as a method of war – both of which, committed intentionally, are war crimes”.

Mr Turk told the Human Rights Council that peace in the region could only be achieved if Israeli leaders accepted the right of Palestinians to live in an independent state and all Palestinian factions accepted the right of Israel to exist in peace and security.

“The core challenge of building peace is for all to see and fully grasp the humanity of the other, overcoming mindsets that have been deeply engraved by generations of harm and rage, and which conceal the truth: that people – Palestinian and Israeli people – are being cruelly harmed,” he told the Human Rights Council.

In her response, the Israeli representative to the Human Rights Council said that 1,200 Israelis had been butchered and countless others had been subjected to unspeakable acts of violence at the hands of Hamas.

“The minimal reference to these horrific acts in your statement today,” Ambassador Meirav Eilon Shahar told the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, “is an affront to the victims and supports those who seek to remove these crimes from the narrative altogether”.

“Israel is fighting in a battlefield that Hamas has created in Gaza,” she said, “one in which terrorists hide behind and within the civilian population”.

“One that the UN has witnessed being built around and below them for years and chose to ignore one in which 500km of terror tunnel snake beneath civilian infrastructure, homes, schools and your headquarters, where 1000s of rockets are launched indiscriminately at our cities and where innocent civilians are intentionally placed in harm’s way,” she told the Human Rights Council.

She said the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza had been reduced to “a mere footnote” in the discourse of the Human Rights Council.