Craig Mokhiber, a top United Nations human rights official who stepped down at the weekend over the organisation’s response to the war in Gaza, has called on the UN to attach the same standards to Israel as it does when assessing human rights violations in other countries around the world.
Mokhiber, who was the director of the New York office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote in his October 28 resignation letter that Israel’s military actions in Gaza were “textbook genocide”, and accused the UN of again “failing” to act, referring to previous genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Myanmar.
Mokhiber, an international human rights lawyer, had been with the UN since 1992 and worked previously as a human rights adviser in Afghanistan and the occupied Palestinian territories.
At least 8,805 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since October 7 after the armed group Hamas launched a surprise assault on Israel, killing at least 1,400 people and taking more than 200 people captive.
“The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial-settler ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs … leaves no room for doubt,” Mokhiber said in his letter to the UN human rights chief, Volker Turk.
Al Jazeera’s correspondent at the UN, Gabriel Elizondo, sat down with Mokhiber in New York.
Article from www.aljazeera.com