NEW YORK (Dispatches) – The human rights chief of the United Nations has criticized the Zionist regime’s far-right finance minister for remarks in which he called for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be “wiped out”, describing the comments as “an unfathomable statement of incitement to violence and hostility”.
“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is a tragedy, a tragedy above all for the Palestinian people,” Volker Turk told the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council as he formally presented a report on the situation in the occupied territories.
He was referring to remarks by Bezalel Smotrich, the head of a pro-settler party in Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition cabinet. Smotrich made the comments on Wednesday after a spate of deadly Zionist settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
“My report finds that over the reporting period, lethal force has been frequently employed by the Israeli security forces (ISF) regardless of the level of threat and at times even as an initial measure rather than as last resort,” Turk said.
“My office has also documented several cases of apparent extrajudicial targeted killings by members of the ISF,” he said. “The report finds that 131 Palestinians were killed by ISF personnel over the past year in a context of law enforcement that is outside any context of hostilities. This includes 65 people who we understand were not armed nor engaged in any attacks or clashes.”
The UN official made a direct call for the Zionist regime to end its occupation of and settlement activities across the Palestinian territories.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement has categorically denounced the Zionist regime’s judiciary’s decision to release most of extremists suspected of participating in the settler rampage in a West Bank Palestinian town over the weekend.
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said in a statement that “the Israeli judiciary’s decision to release the terrorist settlers, who carried out the Huwara pogrom in Nablus, confirms once again the occupying Israeli regime’s fascism and racism against the Palestinian nation.”
He added that, “The act also shows the regime’s complicity in the crime perpetrated against Palestinians before the eyes of the international community, and thus emboldens Israeli settler militias to exhibit more aggression.”
Qassem called on the international community to take serious and practical measures to punish Zionist authorities, hold them accountable for the Huwara pogrom as well as other crimes against Palestinians people, and act beyond words of condemnation.
On Thursday night, Israeli judicial officials released most of the Zionist settlers who had been arrested against the backdrop of the pogrom they carried out over the weekend in the Palestinian town of Huwwara, south of Nablus.