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Main events on September 16th
- The Israeli military killed more than 100 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority in besieged Gaza City, destroying at least 17 homes and residential buildings and a mosque since the early hours of the morning.
- A large number of Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles were shown to be advancing toward Gaza City, with the Israeli army saying a third division will soon join the ground invasion.
- An independent UN inquiry found that Israel’s nearly two-year war on Gaza is a genocide, and Israel responded by calling it “fabricated”.
- Israeli soldiers killed two young Palestinians with live bullets and shot and wounded another in separate incidents amid ongoing raids across the occupied West Bank, during which at least 40 people were detained.
- The Houthis in Yemen claimed responsibility for launching two ballistic missiles at Israel after Israeli warplanes bombed the port city of Hodeidah and officials vowed more attacks.
- France urged a halt to the Israeli attacks as the European Union is set to decide on suspending the trade section of the bloc’s cooperation agreement with Israel.
- Thousands of Israelis protested in Jerusalem and marched from the residence of Benjamin Netanyahu to his office as families of captives demanded their release through a ceasefire deal with Hamas.
On Tuesday, in a groundbreaking report, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory officially concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This, of course, comes as the members of the commission are set to soon step down, after announcing their resignations this summer amid the US’s escalating attacks on the UN.
In this exclusive interview, Mehdi speaks with two of the commissioners behind this report: Chair Navi Pillay and commissioner Chris Sidoti, one of Australia’s most prominent human rights lawyers.
In the interview, Pillay – who served as president for the UN’s International Tribunal for Rwanda – immediately draws parallels between Israel’s genocide and the Rwandan genocide.
Chair Navi Pillay: “It’s when I came to the deliberate shooting of the single standing building where the fertility clinic was and the embryos that immediately reminded me of the Rwanda genocide where I was a judge and where they ripped the bellies of pregnant women, pulled out the fetuses because they wanted to kill off the entire Tutsi group,” Pillay and Sidoti also both point out that unlike the Rwandan genocide, Palestinians in Gaza do not have neighboring countries they can escape to. Chris Sidoti: “There is nowhere that the people of Gaza can go to escape this slaughter”.
The commissioners also address criticism that their report does not cover Hamas’s war crimes, with Pillay noting that the commission has addressed Hamas’s war crimes in previous reports.
