Israel's occupation, discrimination against Palestinians main cause of violence: UN report

Israel’s occupation and discrimination against Palestinians are the main causes of the endless cycles of violence, UN investigators said Tuesday.

A high-level team of investigators, appointed last year by the United Nations Human Rights Council to probe “all underlying root causes” in the decades-long conflict, pointed the finger squarely at Israel.

“Ending the occupation of lands by Israel… remains essential in ending the persistent cycles of violence,” they said in a report, decrying ample evidence that Israel has “no intention” of doing so.

The 18-page report mainly focuses on evaluating a long line of past UN investigations, reports and rulings on the situation, and how and if those findings were implemented.

Recommendations in past reports were “overwhelmingly directed towards Israel,” lead investigator Navi Pillay, a former UN rights chief from South Africa, said in a statement.

This, she said, was “an indicator of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the reality of one state occupying the other.”

The investigators also determined that those recommendations “have overwhelmingly not been implemented,” she said, pointing to calls to ensure accountability for Israel’s violations of international law but also “indiscriminate firing of rockets” by Palestinian armed groups into Israel.

 

“It is this lack of implementation coupled with a sense of impunity, clear evidence that Israel has no intention of ending the occupation, and the persistent discrimination against Palestinians that lies at the heart of the systematic recurrence of violations in both the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.”

Israel has refused to cooperate with the Commission of Inquiry (COI) created last year following the 11-day Hamas-Israel war in May 2021.

Israel and its allies have long accused the top UN rights body of anti-Israel bias.

The COI, which is the highest-level investigation that can be ordered by the council, is the ninth probe it has ordered into rights violations in Palestinian territories.

It is the first, however, tasked with looking at systematic abuses committed within Israel, the first open-ended probe, and the first to examine “root causes” in the drawn-out conflict.