The United Nations should consider suspending Israel's membership due to extensive breaches of international law, stated Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, during a briefing in New York.
“It is time to consider suspending Israel’s membership status within the UN,” Albanese remarked, as quoted on the organization’s website. She urged the international community to recognize the situation in Gaza as genocide, highlighting what she described as a broader intent behind Israel's actions in Palestine. According to Albanese, the condition of Palestinian civilians in Gaza goes beyond war crimes and crimes against humanity. She acknowledged that suspending a country’s UN membership is a sensitive matter, given that most countries face human rights challenges. However, she pointed out that “no other country has continued an illegal occupation while defying UN resolutions for decades as Israel has.”
Additionally, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health Tlaleng Mofokeng accused Israel and its allies of deliberately enforcing hunger and dehydration upon Gaza's residents, which she warned could lead to the annihilation of an entire generation. Describing Gaza as “a wasteland of debris and human remains,” Mofokeng noted that Palestinians are struggling to survive amid severe destruction. She further asserted that Israel had fulfilled a previous commitment to destroy Gaza.
On October 31, Gaza's Ministry of Health reported that over 43,200 Palestinians had been killed in the enclave since Israel’s military operation began in October 2023.
In December 2023, South Africa filed a lawsuit against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing it of violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza. On January 26, the ICJ issued provisional measures instructing Israel to take all necessary actions to prevent genocide in Gaza. Since then, South Africa has submitted three urgent requests to the ICJ, seeking an end to Israel's military operations in Gaza and an expansion of humanitarian aid for the enclave’s population.
On October 28 of this year, South Africa’s presidential office announced that it had presented a 750-page memorandum of evidence to the ICJ to support its case against Israel.
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Based on materials from TASS