Israel carried out a “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system” during its war with Hamas, actions amounting to both war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination, a United Nations inquiry said today.
The report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, a fact finding mission set up by the U.N Human Rights Council to investigate war crimes, also said Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups “committed the war crimes of torture, inhuman or cruel treatment and the crimes against humanity and other inhumane acts” against Israel hostages.
But it reserved most of its criticism for Israeli forces which it said had “deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles while tightening their siege on Gaza and restricting permits to leave the territory for medical treatment.”
NBC News has reached out to the Israel Defense Forces for comment on the report, which was produced by a panel of independent experts who do not speak for the world body and led by Navi Pillay, a former U.N. human rights chief.
In what it called one of the “most egregious cases” the report highlighted the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who became one of the conflict’s most high-profile victims of the war when, on Jan. 29, her final pleas over the phone to be saved were recorded by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and heard around the world.
Hind and her relatives piled into the car following evacuation orders issued by the IDF in Arabic. As they tried to flee their neighborhood in Gaza City, they were shot leaving Hind the only one alive in the back seat of a car, trapped inside and surrounded by the bodies of her aunt, uncle and four young cousins.
She spent hours on the phone with emergency services and her mother, begging to be rescued. Twelve days later, once the area became accessible to rescuers, she was found dead in the back of the car. A blown-out ambulance containing the remains of the two paramedics who were sent to rescue her was found nearby.
“The Commission determined on reasonable grounds that the Israeli Army’s 162nd Division operated in the area and is responsible for killing the family of seven, shelling the ambulance and killing the two paramedics inside. This constitutes the war crimes of willful killing and an attack against civilian objects,” the report said.
It also accused Israel of the “institutionalized mistreatment of Palestinian detainees” held in its prisons which are under the authority of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the country’s ultranationalist minister of national security.
“The lack of accountability for actions ordered by senior Israeli authorities and carried out by individual members of Israeli security forces and the increasing acceptance of violence against Palestinians have allowed such conduct to continue uninterrupted, becoming systematic and institutionalized,” it said.
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