A powerful indictment of Israel’s war vs Palestine

As Israel continues its deadly attacks on Gaza, with civilian deaths nearing 9,000, mostly children and women in over 11,000 targets, the United Nations top human rights body has warned that the “disproportionate attacks… could amount to war crimes.”

Earlier, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had sounded out such warning. In response, Israel authorities said they would deny visas to UN officials seeking entry into Gaza.

(One can’t help noting that the “tokhang” drug war in the Philippines killed at least 8,000 civilians as admitted by the police. And that our government similarly replied to international criticism by announcing that visas would be denied to probers from the International Criminal Court.)

In a powerful indictment, the director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) wants a stronger stance: “We are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it.”

“As someone who has investigated human rights in Palestine since the l980s, lived in Gaza as a human rights advisor in the l990s and carried out several human rights missions to the country before and since, this is deeply personal to me,” wrote Craig Mokhiber to OHCHR chief Volker Turk, published online on Oct. 31.

Recalling the previous genocides against the Tutsis (Rwanda), Bosnian Muslims, the Yazidis (Syria) and the Rohingya (Myanmar), Mokhiber noted that in each case the OHCHR failed in its duty “to meet the imperatives of prevention of mass atrocities, protection of the vulnerable and accountability for the perpetrators.”

“And so it has been with successive waves of murder and persecution against the Palestinians throughout the entire life of the UN,” he wrote lamenting, “High Commissioner, we are failing again.”

The current “wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people,  rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology,” Mokhiber wrote, follows “decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their identity as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders of the Israeli government and military.”

Saying there’s no room for doubt or debate on the