Justice S. Muralidhar, Chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, discusses the United Nations panel’s report on crimes committed on Palestinian children by Israeli security forces resulting in the death of at least 20,179 and injury of 44,143 children since the October 7, 2023 armed incursions by Hamas. The former Chief Justice of Orissa High Court and currently a senior advocate practising in the Supreme Court of India, in an interview with The Hindu, explains findings of systematic targeting of the most vulnerable Palestinian populations — women, children, and the elderly.
One of the objectives of the Commission is to find the root causes of recurrent tensions, systematic discrimination, and repression. What is driving this specific targeting of the most vulnerable sections of the population—women, children, and the elderly?
The conflict can be traced in the modern era to the 1947 United Nations resolution based on the two-state framework of the State of Israel and the State of Palestine. There has always been a grievance by the Palestinian people that they were not consulted on what should constitute the territory of either state. These boiling issues have never been resolved. We have had the Nakba—the en masse exodus of Palestinian people driven from their land—and the Yom Kippur war. Every time, Israel tries to expand its territorial limits, a process that continues today. Israel’s vision of what constitutes its state stands at odds with the UN resolution itself. Hence, it tries to present a fait accompli, operating on the premise that once they have occupied these territories, they cannot be asked to leave.
