Palestinians ‘trapped’ between Israeli settler violence and Hamas atrocities, UN Commission chair tells Arab News
NEW YORK CITY: Two systems of violence — one entrenched in the occupied West Bank and enabled by the Israeli state, the other born of Gaza’s ruin and enforced by Hamas — are closing in on the same population from opposite directions, the chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory told Arab News.
“They are trapped,” said Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, a former chief justice of India’s Orissa High Court who took over as chair of the three-member commission in November. “Trapped from both ends. The borders are all sealed, you have security forces all around you, and then you have to deal with the Palestinian armed groups themselves.”
That image runs through the commission’s latest report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, which found settler attacks in the West Bank rose by 130 percent in a single year, while in Gaza, Hamas-affiliated forces carried out hundreds of executions, beatings, and mutilations against the population they claim to govern.
“They are sandwiched between two groups which do not believe in any rule of law, in any form of justice,” Muralidhar said. “There are no norms. It is like you are breaking up a population completely and watching them slowly die.”
