The Health Ministry has ordered doctors not to talk to members of the UN Human Rights Council.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Israel will not cooperate with a virulently anti-Israel UN agency that has begun investigating the October 7 massacre, ordering doctors not to talk to those requesting testimony, Channel 11 reported Monday.
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which reports to the UN’s Human Rights Council (UNHRC), began sending emails and letters in the last several weeks to senior hospital physicians asking for data and interviews.
The Justice Ministry has told Health Ministry lawyers to instruct all those who provided medical care to thousands of survivors of the mass shootings, arson attacks, rapes and other atrocities, as well as to hostages freed in a November deal with Hamas, not to comply.
“The Ministry of Health basically ordered the whole health system and anyone linked to it not cooperate with this committee because they are anti-Israel,” said reporter Ketty Dor. She added that the requests, one of which she read aloud, were framed as coming “from Israeli members of the UN.”
The letter said that the writers “were investigating war crimes perpetrated by Hamas, including sexual violence” and asked for the addressee’s help.
Despite the commission’s acknowledgment that Israel had been a victim of crimes against humanity, the Foreign Ministry told the news channel that “This is a body that was established by the UN Human Rights Council after [2021’s] Operation Guardian of the Walls to investigate Israel. Three known anti-Israel, antisemites were appointed to lead it. We’re talking about a biased body that the State of Israel will not cooperate with.”
The commission’s chairwoman is a South African judge, Navi Pillay, who is a supporter of the BDS movement. She and the other two, Miloon Kothari from India and Australian Chris Sidoti have made many anti-Israel statements in the past, and Jerusalem has called for their resignations in the past, charging that they are not “objective and impartial” as UN regulations require of their employees.
Israel has not cooperated with any of their reports on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, deeming it a lost cause and not wanting to legitimize their work in any way. The government’s concern was borne out when the reports that have come out so far have gone so far as accusing Israel of apartheid and torture, while ignoring decades of Palestinian terrorism.
The commission has the unprecedented right to carry out its probe with no time limit. Its mandate also allows it to investigate Israel’s behavior even well before the so-called “occupation” that is supposed to be its focus, which proves to Jerusalem that its purpose is to delegitimize the Jewish state’s existence.
Almost all the territory that Palestinians claim as theirs which Israel liberated in 1967 was originally promised to the Jewish people by the British, who ruled the region after World War I. This promise was subsequently backed by international law in the form of the League of Nations, all of whose decisions were automatically adopted by its successor, the United Nations.