NEW YORK CITY: Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank this week, which killed at least 12 Palestinians including five children, might constitute a war crime, UN experts said on Wednesday.
Houses, apartment buildings and other infrastructure were damaged during two days of raids on Monday and Tuesday, and more than 4,000 Palestinians were forced to flee.
Israel’s actions amounted “to egregious violations of international law and standards on the use of force and may constitute a war crime,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, and Paula Betancur, the special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons.
“The attacks were the fiercest in the West Bank since the destruction of the Jenin camp in 2002,” they added.
Albanese and Betancur highlighted reports of ambulance crews being denied access to the refugee camp, thereby preventing injured people from receiving medical assistance.
“It is heart-breaking to see thousands of Palestinian refugees, originally displaced since 1947-1949, forced to march out of the camp in abject fear at the dead of night,” they said.
Special rapporteurs are part of what is known as the special procedures of the UN Human Rights Council. They are independent experts who work on a voluntary basis, are not members of UN staff and are not paid for their work.
Albanese and Betancur denounced Israel’s “counterterrorism” operation and said there is no justification for such actions under international law.
“The attacks constitute collective punishment of the Palestinian population, who have been labelled a ‘collective security threat’ in the eyes of Israeli authorities,” they said.
They also expressed “grave concern” about the weapons and tactics deployed at least twice over the past two weeks by Israeli forces against the population of Jenin.
“The Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory are protected persons under international law, guaranteed of all human rights, including the presumption of innocence,” Albanese and Betancur said.
“They cannot be treated as a collective security threat by the occupying power; all the more while it advances the annexation of occupied Palestinian land, and displacement and dispossession of its Palestinian residents.”
Israel’s operations in Jenin represent “amplifications of the structural violence that has permeated” the Occupied Palestinian Territories for many years, they added.
“The impunity that Israel has enjoyed for its acts of violence over decades only fuel and intensify the recurring cycle of violence.”
The UN experts called for Israel to be held accountable under international law for its “illegal occupation and violent acts to perpetuate it.”
They added: “For this relentless violence to end, Israel’s illegal occupation must end. It cannot be corrected or improved in the margins because it is wrong to the core.”
