Nov 1, 2023, 3:14 PM

Senior UN official resigns over failure to stop Gaza genocide

Senior UN official resigns over failure to stop Gaza genocide

TEHRAN, Nov. 01 (MNA) – The director of the UN’s Human Rights Office (OHCHR) in New York, Craig Mokhiber, has resigned from his post, citing the body’s failure to properly address the Israel-Palestine crisis.

“Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it,” Craig Mokhiber said in a letter to UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Volker Turk, published on Tuesday.

Instead of doing its job, the UN has “surrendered to the power of the US” and given in to the “Zionist lobby,” while the “European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase,” the senior official claimed.

The official squarely described the ongoing Zionist action in the Gaza Strip as “genocide,” acknowledging that this word “has often been subject to political abuse,” Russia Today (RT) reported.

The governments of the US, the UK, and “much of Europe are wholly complicit in the horrific assault,” not only through a mere failure to fulfill their international obligations but by “actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Zionist’s atrocities,” Mokhiber stated.

The “cover” is further reinforced by “Western corporate media, increasingly captured and state-adjacent,” which has been “continuously dehumanizing Palestinians to facilitate the genocide, and broadcasting propaganda for war and advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred,” he stressed.

Mokhiber believes the UN used to have “principles” and “authority” rooted in the body’s “integrity,” such as during apartheid in South Africa, but it has lost all of the above over the years. The UN has repeatedly failed to stop genocides, Mokhiber noted, listing events in Rwanda and Bosnia, the genocide of the Yazidis by the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), and the Rohingya in Myanmar as examples.

“In recent decades, key parts of the UN have surrendered to the power of the US and to the fear of the Zionist Lobby, to abandon these principles, and to retreat from international law itself. We have lost a lot in this abandonment, not least our own global credibility. But the Palestinian people have sustained the biggest losses as a result of our failures,” he stated.

To fix the situation, the UN should “learn from the principled stance taken in cities around the world in recent days as masses of people stand up against the genocide, even at risk of beatings and arrest,” he suggested.

Apart from that, he called upon the body to drop the “illusory two-state solution,” advocating the creation of a “single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine,” which would ensure the “dismantling” of Israeli regime, described by the official as a “deeply racist, settler-colonial project.”

SD/PR

News ID 207836

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