Jerusalem/Geneva, Switzerland
Reuters
Israel has told the United Nations Human Rights Council that it is disengaging from the body, alleging it was biased, Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Thursday.
Council members have frequently raised allegations of Israeli human rights violations in the Gaza war, while a UN inquiry it set up found last year that the immense scale of killings amounted to a crime against humanity.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar attends a joint press conference with Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani (not pictured), in Rome, Italy, on 14th January, 2025. PICTURE: Reuters/Guglielmo Mangiapane/File photo
Israel rejected the finding and says it takes care to avoid civilian casualties. It has long criticised the Geneva-based body and has disengaged in the past.
In a letter to UNHRC President Jorg Lauber, Saar said: “The decision was reached in light of the ongoing and unrelenting institutional bias against Israel in the Human Rights Council, which has been persistent since its inception in 2006.”
The United States, Israel’s close ally, withdrew from the council on Tuesday.
The Israeli move drew disapproval from a UN rights expert, although Israel is not one of the council’s 47 voting members and did not always attend meetings.
While the council has no legally binding power, its debates carry political weight and scrutiny can raise global pressure on governments to change course.
Sometimes, investigations mandated by the council can lead to prosecutions for war crimes in international courts.
“The Human Rights Council has been a biased body since its beginning, where dictatorships lecture democracies on human rights,” Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Daniel Meron, told reporters.
“Israel remains committed to human rights and will engage through credible, non politicised mechanisms,” he added.
He said the move was not coordinated with Washington and probably would have happened irrespective of the US withdrawal.
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The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories said Israel’s decision to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council was “extremely serious”.
“It shows the hubris and the lack of realisation of what they [Israel] have done. They insist in self-righteousness, that they have nothing to be held accountable for, and they are proving it to the entire international community,” Francesca Albanese told Reuters.
Albanese said she feared Israel’s “genocide” against the Palestinians would expand and intensify on the West Bank, which Palestinians want along with Gaza as the core of a future independent state.
Israel denies accusations that it is committing genocide and says it is protecting its legitimate security interests in both the West Bank and in Gaza, where a fragile ceasefire now holds after a 16-month war against the Islamist militant group Hamas.
“The north [of the West Bank] is being attacked primarily by soldiers. The south has been attacked primarily by [Israeli] settlers, and you can see this as an assault on the Palestinian people as a whole,” Albanese said.
Commenting on US President Donald Trump’s surprise proposal this week that the United States could “take over” Gaza, Albanese said: “Trump is destroying the basic principles of respect for human rights across a huge spectrum, not just in Palestine…We have moved further towards the abyss.”
“I’m surprised that European states are staying silent instead of rising up and saying,: ‘This is utter nonsense, and we will not tolerate this’,” she added.
– With reporting by OLIVIA LE POIDEVIN
