#unhrc

Let's look at just one article: https://archive.is/krfW4

The article misleadingly attributes the report broadly to "the UN."

It omits that the report comes specifically from a 3-person commission created by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), an entity with a wildly disproportionate and undeniable structural focus on Israel.

The UNHRC has a permanent 10-item agenda for its regular sessions. Under this framework, Israel is the only country in the world with a dedicated, permanent agenda item ("Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories"). Human rights situations in all other 192 UN member states (including notorious human rights violators like North Korea, Syria, Iran, and South Sudan) are grouped together and debated under a single, general category, Agenda Item 4. As of recent counts, the UNHRC has passed over 110 condemnatory resolutions against Israel.

For context, this is more than double the number passed against Syria (the second-most condemned country at around 45), and vastly outnumbers resolutions targeting Iran, Russia, or North Korea.

The article fails to mention that this specific commission operates under an unprecedented, permanent, open-ended mandate. The founding resolution for this inquiry omitted any mention of Hamas or its terrorism.

The article names the chair, Srinivasan Muralidhar, but omits the names (and thereby the partisan backgrounds) of panel members like Chris Sidoti. Sidoti has a history of pro-Palestinian advocacy and previously accused Jewish organizations of "throwing around accusations of antisemitism like rice at a wedding," breaching UN requirements for strict impartiality.

The article uses judicial language ("independent inquiry," "findings") to dishonestly frame a deeply contested, political document as an undisputed judicial truth while framing the Israeli rebuttal as a simple, defensive dismissal.

Then there's the excremental "report" itself.

The "report" relies on loose images of bullet fragments as definitive proof of IDF responsibility without providing anything like a documented chain of custody or independent forensic verification.

The report routinely uses medical doctors and hospital staff as expert witnesses on military tactics, ballistics, and weapon systems - subjects completely outside their medical training.

The commission relies on family members to determine the tactical intent of a military strike, asking civilians to verify whether an attack was "deliberately targeted" against a child.

The report erases Hamas's 17-year history of embedding military infrastructure inside civilian areas. Further, it fails to investigate or account for the documented deployment of minors as active combatants by Palestinian armed groups.

The report invents its own interpretation of international law, claiming that if a military executes a strike knowing civilians are present, the attack is automatically an intentional war crime. This completely erases the standard legal doctrine of military proportionality.

Issued February 4, 2025.

**Too bad the UN is a pretty useless organization that relies on self discipline. They don't have the authority to do anything but issue strongly worded statements. Unless the guilty party is going to punish themselves, it goes no further. This was written about 2 weeks ago so the # has risen since then.**

UN rights office calls for investigation into ‘possible war crime’ amid reports Israeli forces allegedly ‘executed’ 11 Palestinian men in Gaza.

The United Nations human rights office has called for an independent inquiry into allegations that Israeli forces “summarily executed” at least 11 Palestinian men in Gaza in what it called “a possible war crime”.

“The Israeli authorities must immediately institute an independent, thorough and effective investigation into these allegations, and if found to be substantiated, those responsible must be brought to justice and measures implemented to prevent any such serious violations from recurring,” said the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in a statement on Wednesday.

Al Jazeera spoke to several witnesses to Tuesday’s raid during which Israeli troops allegedly surrounded and stormed a residential building, going floor to floor to separate the men from the women and children, and then shooting dead 11 of the men in front of their family members. The men were in their 20s and 30s, survivors said.

“They saw us, men and their wives and children. My brother-in-law tried to speak and explain all in the house are civilians, but they shot him dead,” one survivor told Al Jazeera of the attack on families who were sheltering in al-Adwa building in Gaza City’s Remal neighbourhood.

The soldiers “forced their way into every home, killed the men and detained the women and children. We do not know their whereabouts. They did the same on every floor. All women were rounded up in one room. By the time they reached us on the sixth floor, they started shooting all men,” a woman said, adding that her father-in-law and son were shot and killed instantly.

Survivors also said that the Israeli soldiers also attacked the women and children after ordering them into a room in the residential block also known as Annan building.

“The Israeli soldiers rounded up all the women in one room, then fired three mortar shells on us, then kept shooting their machine guns at us,” a wounded woman said.

“I was hit with a bullet in my hand, my daughter in her head, my younger daughter was killed and my son is blind. My husband was executed in cold blood. All my other daughters suffered severe injuries, broken bones and flesh torn open. We were all hit by bullets or shrapnel,” she added.

Analyst Tamer Qarmout, an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, welcomed the UN call for an investigation into the “unlawful killings”, telling Al Jazeera that the key issue is how such probes are going to be conducted.

None of the entities that could investigate alleged Israeli crimes against Palestinians is currently allowed into the Gaza Strip, Qarmout noted.

Other witnesses recalled that the men were forced to strip before being shot, and one man said that “even young boys were not spared. They were all battered and bludgeoned. They suffered broken bones and are in hospital.”

Look who's lecturing #Russia about human rights at UN...