Israel charged Monday that it appears that the United Nations Human Rights Council doesn’t believe that Israel has the right to self-defense against the rockets Gaza Palestinians launch against its citizens on the southern border, the Jerusalem Post reports.
“You have done nothing about it, and you expect that Israel does nothing either,” Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Aharon Leshno Yaar, told the body during a day-long council debate about the Jewish state’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza. Later this week, the council is expected to approve four resolutions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Just last week, he said, one such rocket killed a Thai man, Manee Singueanphon, who was working in a greenhouse near the Gaza border. He accused council members of disproportionately focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a way to shift the body’s focus away from their own human rights issues.
Yaar noted that even South African jurist Richard Goldstone had stated that “the firing of these rockets are war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity.”
Of course, the Goldstone Report’s real position on the seriousness of rocket attacks is a little shaky. Last month, Desmond Travers, a retired Irish army colonel who was one of the four members of the “fact-finding” commission that produced the report, claimed that Hamas fired “only two rockets” at Israel prior to last year’s Gaza war.
We’d been wondering about the commissioners’ moral compass, but now we have to wonder about their basic ability to count.
