The United Nations (UN) Independent [sic] International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory [sic], including East Jerusalem [sic], and Israel, headed by Navi Pillay, accused Israel of “genocide” on Tuesday.
Pillay is the latest South Africa to make the “genocide” claim, in what has become a cottage industry of so-called human rights experts who cite their South African experience to trash Israel.
Pillay claimed in the New York Times that the Israeli war in Gaza — a war started by Hamas with a brutal attack on 1200 people in Israel, most of them civilians — was akin to the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
She added:
The scale of destruction is devastating. More than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 18,000 children and nearly 10,000 women, according to Gazan health officials. Estimated life expectancy in Gaza has collapsed from 75 years to just over 40 in a single year, one of the steepest declines recorded. Hospitals, schools, churches, mosques and entire neighborhoods have been destroyed. Our analysis found that starvation has been used as a weapon of war and that the medical system has been deliberately destroyed. Maternal health care has been severely undermined. Children have been starved, shot and buried under rubble. According to UNICEF, one child has died every hour in Gaza. These are not the accidents of war. They are acts calculated to bring about the destruction of a people.
At no stage does Pillay question reports from Hamas sources, or Hamas’s culpability or the ongoing war. She also repeats false claims about Palestinians killed at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution sites, and ignores the fact that Israel has shipped, and allowed, vast amounts of aid into Gaza — the first time in history any warring party has fed an enemy, despite the fact that the enemy is responsible for the war.
The report itself includes glaring errors, such as the Biblical misquote also used by the South African legal team that accused Israel of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice in early 2024. (The report cites the text of Samuel, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was citing a text from Deuteronomy.)
She mentions the Israeli hostages held by Hamas, but does not bother to demand their immediate release.
Israel responded by calling the report’s authors “Hamas proxies, notorious for their openly antisemitic position.”
Pillay has a long history of anti-Israel bias — common within South African legal, media, and political elites.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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