Geneva: Israel’s long-contentious relationship with the United Nations has since October 7 spiralled to new depths, amid insults and accusations and even a questioning of the country’s continued UN membership.
Addressing the UN General Assembly on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the world body of treating his country unfairly.
“Until this anti-Semitic swamp is drained, the UN will be viewed by fair-minded people everywhere as nothing more than a contemptuous farce,” he thundered.
The past year has seen repeated accusations from within the UN system that Israel is committing “genocide” in its war in Gaza, while Israeli officials have made charges of bias and have even accused the UN chief of being “an accomplice to terror.”
The heat has been turned way up in a war of words that has raged between Israel and various UN bodies for decades.
And temperatures have risen further in recent days amid Israel’s escalating strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“There has been a great deterioration” in the relationship, said Cyrus Schayegh, an international history and politics professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
“It has gone from fairly bad to really bad.”
Since Hamas’s deadly attack inside Israel nearly a year ago, UN-linked courts, councils, agencies and staff have unleashed a barrage of condemnation and criticism of Israel’s devastating retaliatory operation in Gaza.
“We feel the UN has betrayed Israel,” the country’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva Daniel Meron told AFP.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
Of the 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed more than 41,500 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN has described the figures as reliable.
Israel has especially taken aim at UNRWA, the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, but its ire has been felt across the UN system, and up to the UN chief.
Israeli calls for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to resign began just weeks after October 7, when he asserted that the attack “did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”
Even before October 7, Israel complained of UN bias, pointing for instance to the towering number of resolutions targeting the country.
Since the creation of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006, more than a third of the over 300 condemnatory resolutions have targeted Israel, Meron pointed out, describing this as “mind-boggling.”
Critics meanwhile highlight that from the time a General Assembly vote paved the way for Israel’s establishment in 1948, the country has ignored numerous UN resolutions and international court rulings, without consequences.
Israel has always snubbed resolution 194, which guarantees the Palestinians expelled in 1948 from the territory Israel conquered the right to return or to compensation.
It has also ignored rulings condemning its forceful acquisition of territory and the annexation of East Jerusalem after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the continuing and expanding settlement policy in the West Bank, among others.
By allowing Israel to remain in “non-compliance with international law, the West has been basically making the Israelis believe that they are above international law,” Geneva Graduate Institute political sociology professor Riccardo Bocco told AFP.
Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the UN rights office, also said a lack of accountability in the Middle East crisis appeared to have made “the parties to the conflict more brazen.”
“We rang the alarm bells multiple times and now there is the impression that impunity reigns,” she told AFP, lamenting increasing attacks on UN bodies and staff expressing concern over the situation.
“This is unacceptable.”
UNRWA has faced the harshest attacks.
It saw a series of funding cuts after Israel accused more than a dozen of its 13,000 Gaza employees of involvement in the October 7 attack.
Agency chief Philippe Lazzarini has accused Israel of conducting “a concerted effort to dismantle UNRWA,” which has suffered dramatic human and material losses in Gaza, with more than 220 staff killed.
Netanyahu demanded earlier this year that UNRWA, which he said “perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem (and) whose schools indoctrinate Palestinian children with genocide and terror ... be replaced by responsible aid agencies.”
Francesca Albanese, the UN independent rights expert on the Palestinian territories, who has faced harsh criticism and calls for her ousting from Israel amid her repeated accusation it is committing “genocide” in Gaza, recently suggested the country was becoming a “pariah.”
“Should there be a consideration of its membership as part of this organization, which Israel seems to have zero respect for?” she rhetorically asked journalists last week.
Meron slammed Albanese as “anti-Semitic and really an embarrassment to the UN.”
Other experts warned that Israel’s disregard for the UN was threatening the broader respect for the organization.
Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN expert on the right to drinking water, warned of the consequences when UN bodies “make decisions and nothing is respected.”
“We are blowing up the United Nations if we don’t react.”
Israel-UN relations sink to new depths
https://arab.news/n5tf2
Israel-UN relations sink to new depths
- The past year has seen repeated accusations from within the UN system that Israel is committing “genocide” in its war in Gaza
Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case
Condemned internationally and at home, the senior official in the provincial government in North Sumatra, Terbit Rencana Perangin-angin, had been accused of human trafficking, torture, forced labor, and slavery.
Prosecutors launched an appeal after a lower court acquitted him of the charges in July.
Indonesia’s Supreme Court said he would serve four years in jail, without specifying reasons, in a ruling dated Nov. 15 and seen on the court’s website on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court and prosecutors did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Reuters has sought comment from Terbit’s lawyer.
The macabre case came to light in 2022, when a police corruption investigation into Terbit found people detained in cages on his property, drawing condemnation from rights groups.
A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010, court documents showed.
Terbit, who was jailed for nine years for corruption in 2022, had previously claimed the detained individuals were participating in a drug rehabilitation program.
Prosecutors said they had been tortured and forced to work on his plantation. Six had died in captivity, Indonesia’s rights body found.
Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani protesters demanding the release of ex-prime minister Imran Khan on Tuesday killed four members of the nation’s security forces, the government said, as the crowds defied police and closed in on the capital’s center.
More than ten thousand protesters armed with sticks and slingshots took on police in central Islamabad on Tuesday afternoon, AFP journalists saw, less than three kilometers (two miles) from the government enclave they aim to occupy.
Khan was barred from standing in February elections that were marred by allegations of rigging, sidelined by dozens of legal cases that he claims were confected to prevent his comeback.
But his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has defied a government crackdown with regular rallies. Tuesday’s is the largest in the capital since Khan was jailed in August 2023.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said “miscreants” involved in the march had killed four members of the paramilitary Rangers force on a city highway leading toward the government sector.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the men had been “run over by a vehicle.”
“These disruptive elements do not seek revolution but bloodshed,” he said in a statement. “This is not a peaceful protest, it is extremism.”
The government said Monday that one police officer had also been killed and nine more were critically wounded by demonstrators who set out toward Islamabad on Sunday.
The capital has been locked down since late Saturday, with mobile Internet sporadically cut and more than 20,000 police flooding the streets, many armed with riot shields and batons.
The government has accused protesters of attempting to derail a state visit by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who arrived for a three-day visit on Monday.
Last week, the Islamabad city administration announced a two-month ban on public gatherings.
But PTI convoys traveled from their power base in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the most populous province of Punjab, hauling aside roadblocks of stacked shipping containers.
“We are deeply frustrated with the government, they do not know how to function,” 56-year-old protester Kalat Khan told AFP on Monday. “The treatment we are receiving is unjust and cruel.”
The government cited “security concerns” for the mobile Internet outages, while Islamabad’s schools and universities were also ordered shut on Monday and Tuesday.
“Those who will come here will be arrested,” Interior Minister Naqvi told reporters late Monday at D-Chowk, the public square outside Islamabad’s government buildings that PTI aims to occupy.
PTI’s chief demand is the release of Khan, the 72-year-old charismatic former cricket star who served as premier from 2018 to 2022 and is the lodestar of their party.
They are also protesting alleged tampering in the February polls and a recent government-backed constitutional amendment giving it more power over the courts, where Khan is tangled in dozens of cases.
Sharif’s government has come under increasing criticism for deploying heavy-handed measures to quash PTI’s protests.
“It speaks of a siege mentality on the part of the government and establishment — a state in which they see themselves in constant danger and fearful all the time of being overwhelmed by opponents,” read one opinion piece in the English-language Dawn newspaper published Monday.
“This urges them to take strong-arm measures, not occasionally but incessantly.”
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said “blocking access to the capital, with motorway and highway closures across Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has effectively penalized ordinary citizens.”
The US State Department appealed for protesters to refrain from violence, while also urging authorities to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to ensure respect for Pakistan’s laws and constitution as they work to maintain law and order.”
Khan was ousted by a no-confidence vote after falling out with the kingmaking military establishment, which analysts say engineers the rise and fall of Pakistan’s politicians.
But as opposition leader, he led an unprecedented campaign of defiance, with PTI street protests boiling over into unrest that the government cited as the reason for its crackdown.
PTI won more seats than any other party in this year’s election but a coalition of parties considered more pliable to military influence shut them out of power.
Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine
MOSCOW: Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that if the West supplied nuclear weapons to Ukraine then Moscow could consider such a transfer to be tantamount to an attack on Russia, providing grounds for a nuclear response.
The New York Times reported last week that some unidentified Western officials had suggested that US President Joe Biden could give Ukraine nuclear weapons, though there were fears such a step would have serious implications.
“American politicians and journalists are seriously discussing the consequences of the transfer of nuclear weapons to Kyiv,” Medvedev, who served as Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012, said on Telegram.
Medvedev said that even the threat of such a transfer of nuclear weapons could be considered as preparation for a nuclear war against Russia.
“The actual transfer of such weapons can be equated to the fait accompli of an attack on our country,” under Russia’s newly updated nuclear doctrine, he said.
China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait
- The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait
BEIJING: China’s military said on Tuesday it deployed naval and air forces to monitor and warn a US Navy patrol aircraft that flew through the sensitive Taiwan Strait, denouncing the United States for trying to “mislead” the international community.
Around once a month, US military ships or aircraft pass through or above the waterway that separates democratically governed Taiwan from China — missions that always anger Beijing.
China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and says it has jurisdiction over the strait. Taiwan and the United States dispute that, saying the strait is an international waterway.
The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait “in international airspace,” adding that the flight demonstrated the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.
“By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations,” it said in a statement.
China’s military criticized the flight as “public hype,” adding that it monitored the US aircraft throughout its transit and “effectively” responded to the situation.
“The relevant remarks by the US distort legal principles, confuse public opinion and mislead international perceptions,” the military’s Eastern Theatre Command said in a statement.
“We urge the US side to stop distorting and hyping up and jointly safeguard regional peace and stability.”
In April, China’s military said it sent fighter jets to monitor and warn a US Navy Poseidon in the Taiwan Strait, a mission that took place just hours after a call between the Chinese and US defense chiefs. (Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Additional reporting and writing by Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight
KYIV: Russia staged a record number of drone attacks overnight over Ukraine, damaging buildings and “critical infrastructure” in several regions, the air force said Tuesday.
“During the night attack, the enemy launched a record number of Shahed strike unmanned aerial vehicles and unidentified drones,” the air force said, referring to Iranian-designed drones and putting the figure at 188.
