UN official blasts West’s double standards
The UN’s special rapporteur on the right to housing has rebuked countries he accused of bias on Israel’s offensive on Gaza following a deadly attack by Tel Aviv on the Nuseirat refugee camp in the enclave.
“Countries that celebrate the release of four Israeli hostages without saying a word about the hundreds of Palestinians killed and thousands held in arbitrary detention by Israel, have lost moral credibility for generations and don’t deserve to be on any UN human rights body,” Balakrishnan Rajagopal said on X about the attack that took place on Saturday.
Earlier, the Israeli army announced that it had launched attacks on various locations in the central part of the Gaza Strip and had successfully rescued four captives alive from two different areas.
“Countries that celebrate the release of four Israeli hostages without saying a word about the hundreds of Palestinians killed… have lost moral credibility for generations.”
Citing a US official, CNN reported that an American unit in Israel aided the efforts to rescue the hostages.
US President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were among leaders who greeting their release even as they have also called for a truce.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell welcomed the hostage release and said reports “of another massacre of civilians are appalling… the bloodbath must end immediately”.
The Gaza-based Government Media Office said that at least 274 Palestinians were killed and more than 400 injured on Saturday in severe Israeli airstrikes targeting Nuseirat refugee camp, areas east of Deir al-Balah, and al-Bureij and al-Maghazi camps in central Gaza, coinciding with a sudden incursion of vehicles east and northwest of Nuseirat.
More than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the offensive began on October 7, according to local health authorities.
Eight months into the Israeli offensive, vast tracts of Gaza lay in ruins amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water, and medicine, reports Middle East Monitor Online.
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, whose latest ruling ordered Tel Aviv to immediately halt its operation in the southern city of Rafah, where over a million Palestinians had sought refuge.
“My child was crying, afraid of the sound of the plane firing at us,” said one Gaza woman, Hadeel Radwan, 32, recounting how they fled the intense combat as she carried her seven-month-old daughter.
“We all felt that we wouldn’t survive,” she told AFP. Israel’s top diplomat rejected unspecified accusations “of war crimes” in the operation.
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