“The Israeli army is one of the most criminal armies in the world.”
These are the words stated by Chris Sidoti, a member of the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, during a press conference on the sidelines of a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday.
It comes after a COI report published last week that found both Israel and Hamas militants have committed war crimes. However, the report said that Israel alone was responsible for the most serious abuses under international law known as "crimes against humanity".
At the same press conference on Wednesday, COI chair Navi Pillay the scale of Palestinian civilian losses amounted to "extermination". "We found that the immense numbers of civilian casualties in Gaza and widespread destruction of civilian objects and infrastructure were the inevitable result of an intentional strategy to cause maximum damage,” she said.
