The United Nations is “obsessed” with criticizing Israel, and “always assumes the Jews are to blame,” Yesh Atid party head Yair Lapid has accused. His comments from a Yesh Atid party gathering were reported by the Hebrew-language site NRG.
The UN is expected to release a report in the upcoming days criticizing Israel over the 2014 Protective Edge operation in Gaza.
Lapid noted that the UN had chosen not to investigate the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens at the hands of Hamas immediately prior to the operation. “If that’s not hypocrisy, I don’t know what is,” he said.
Overall, the report “is yet another example that the UN has lost its mind,” Lapid declared. Instead of investigating Israel, he continued, the UN should investigate itself. “How did it lose its honesty, its moral standards, the basic values of fairness for which it was created?” he asked.
He noted that Israel took extensive measures to protect Gaza civilians, including giving advance warning of military operations to allow civilians to leave affected areas and setting up a field hospital near Gaza.
Operation Protective Edge was launched in response to the Hamas terrorist group’s use of tunnels from Gaza to Israel to attack Israeli communities, and to near-constant rocket attacks. During the operation Hamas repeatedly attacked IDF troops in Gaza, leading to heavy fighting at several points near the Gaza border.
Following the operation Hamas accused Israel of war crimes, and claimed that nearly all of the dead were civilians – a claim repeated in the international media, despite strong evidence that at least half of those killed were combatants.
Two recent reports on the conflict have found that Hamas committed war crimes against both Israel and the civilian population of Gaza, and that Israel went above and beyond the law in its attempts to prevent civilian casualties.