Request by Arab States and OIC for Human Rights Council 6th special session – NGO statement (International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists)

Written statement* submitted by the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, a non-governmental organization in special consultative status

The Secretary-General has received the following written statement which is circulated in accordance with Economic and Social Council resolution 1996/31.

[22 January 2008]

*   This written statement is issued, unedited, in the language(s) received from the submitting non-governmental organization(s).

The call for a special session of the Human Rights Council by Syria and Pakistan in the name of the Arab and Islamic states member of the Human Rights Council is a shameful act of blatant hypocrisy which is a total misrepresentation of the incontestable facts on the ground.

The draft resolution which has been circulated in support is a travesty of the truth which nonetheless has the support of certain members of the Council who for reasons that are incomprehensible and make a mockery of every democratic principle, will surely cause irremediable harm to this Council’s standing if this text were to be adopted.

The alleged grave breaches of human rights to which this draft resolution refers as so-called incessant military attacks, are legitimate acts in the exercise of the inherent right of self-defence which Israel is under a duty to exercise in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, as a primary obligation to its citizens against repeated indiscriminate attacks against Israel’s civilian population which are deliberately directed by  terrorist groups acting in the Gaza Strip with the enthusiastic  support of the Hamas terrorist militia.  

These deliberate and unprovoked indiscriminate terrorist  attacks against Israel’s civilian population from the Gaza Strip have continued unabated over the last seven years, concerning which there has been no adverse comment, still less any condemnation by the UN Commission on Human Rights and certainly not by the Human Rights Council, notwithstanding Israel’s withdrawal from this area including the evacuation of 9,00 civilians from this area in 2005, in the forlorn hope that it would be a significant contribution to peace and to a two-state  solution.

Contrary to the deliberate targeting of the civilian population in the area of Sderot and other population centres near the Israel border, comprising no less than 30,000 Israeli citizens, the Israeli urgent security measures have been conducted in the Gaza areas with demonstrated precision against exclusively terrorist groups clearly identified as such, frequently caught in the act of indiscriminate firing of Quassam rockets and mortars into these civilian concentrations.

In the four day period from January 15 to January 18, over 220 Quassam rockets and mortars have been directed against these civilian areas, well within Israel’s uncontested frontiers, respect for the inviolability of which is entirely absent on the part of the Hamas militias and their fellow terrorist groups, who openly and repeatedly proclaim before the whole world their avowed intent to cause death and destruction amongst Israel’s population. So far in the unexpired month of January alone, Palestinian terrorist groups have fired 450 Quassam short range rockets and mortars, the greatest number of such rockets to have struck Israel in a complete one month period.

Yet mention of all these incontrovertible facts are entirely absent from the draft resolution which its promoters and supporters would have the Human Rights Council

adopt.

The genocidal intent of these groups is more than apparent, less than a week before the civilised world under UN auspices will be commemorating the 61st anniversary of the liberation Auschwitz death camp marking the Holocaust, whose example Hamas and its supporters with the aid of the Iranian regime would enthusiastically emulate

according to their repeatedly published statements.

The alleged humanitarian crisis falsely attributed to Israel’s reduction of electrical current to the Gaza Strip supposedly causing the closure of Gaza’s only power plant is a further cynical falsehood claiming that Israel’s decision to reduce fuel supplies was to blame, when the Hamas leaders cynically shut down the power plant providing 20 per cent of the Gaza Strip’s total electricity supply while ensuring that workshops constructing these missiles would not be affected.

This is the greatest challenge to which the Human Rights Council will be obliged to respond since the cynical Hezbollah act of aggression at the Lebanese border with Israel in June 2006, the far reaching negative consequences of which this body’s utter failure to confront , have still to be assessed.

The adoption of such a grotesquely false and unacceptable draft resolution cannot fail to undermine the essential human rights values which the Human Rights Council must imperatively protect by overwhelmingly rejecting this tissue of misrepresentations and falsehoods.

Failure to do so will constitute a major setback for the cause of human rights and the credibility of this body.

——