UN rapporteur warns of risk of new “mass ethnic cleansing”

Francesca Albanese accuses both Hamas and the Israeli occupation forces of having committed “international crimes”, in a statement in which she gives special emphasis to the number of victims on the Palestinian side since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas, following the attack by last Saturday to Israel by the militias of the Islamist movement.

And it denounces, in particular, “the death of more than 600 Palestinian children” and more than 423,000 people displaced “as a result of Israeli attacks”, in a global assessment that, to date, points to the death of more than 2,200 Palestinians and of 1,300 Israelites killed.

In the last few hours, an Israeli ultimatum to the population of northern Gaza caused the flight of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants from a region that has 1.1 million people, that is, half of the enclave’s total population, due to fears of an imminent large-scale land incursion by the Israeli army.

For all these reasons, “the current situation in the Palestinian Territories and Israel has reached a fever pitch,” he said in a statement, noting that “Israel has already committed mass ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians under the fog of war” and is, “in name of self-defense, trying to justify what would constitute another cleansing”.

As an independent expert at the UN Human Rights Council, Albanese calls on the UN and its Member States to “intensify efforts to mediate an immediate ceasefire between the parties” before the situation reaches a “point of no return “.

The official recalls that the Palestinian population has suffered “five large-scale wars since 2008”, a year after the declaration of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, which was “widely condemned by the international community as collective punishment”.

Palestinians have been left without shelter since Israel declared a total siege on the small enclave a week ago, and the Rafah crossing with Egypt, the only border crossing that remains partially suspended, is blocked by shelling, according to Albanese.

The UN expert warns of the serious danger that the international community is witnessing a repeat of the Nakba of 1948 and the Naksa of 1967 (the so-called “Rollback” of the Palestinian population after this year’s Israeli-Arab war), “but in larger scale”.

Therefore, “the international community must do everything in its power to prevent this from happening again”, since, at this moment, “any military operation that Israel decides to carry out will go far beyond the limits of international law “.

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