CNN News: UN human rights official quits over "genocide" in Gaza and blames the West

— "A United Nations human rights official is leaving his job over what he calls a "genocide" in Gaza that the UN has failed to stop.

Craig Mokhiber, the director of the UN's New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a letter that Gaza is a textbook case of genocide. Mokhiber said he lived in Gaza working on human rights for the UN in the 90s.

He accused the United States, the United Kingdom and European countries of giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities."

CNN — October 31, 2023.

The director of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights has left his post, protesting that the UN is “failing” in its duty to prevent what he categorizes as genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza under Israeli bombardment and citing the US, UK and much of Europe as “wholly complicit in the horrific assault”.

Craig Mokhiber wrote on 28 October to the UN high commissioner in Geneva, Volker Turk, saying: “This will be my last communication to you” in his role in New York.

Mokhiber, who was stepping down having reached retirement age, wrote: “Once again we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes and the organization we serve appears powerless to stop it.”

“The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial settler ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs … leaves no room for doubt.”

Mokhiber added: “This is text book case of genocide” and said the US, UK and much of Europe were not only “refusing to meet their treaty obligations” under the Geneva Conventions but were also arming Israel’s assault and providing political and diplomatic cover for it.

“We must support the establishment of a single, democratic secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews,” he wrote, adding: “and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land.”

Mokhiber has worked for the UN since 1992, serving in a number of increasingly prominent roles. He led the high commissioner’s work on devising a human rights-based approach to development, and acted as a senior human rights adviser in Palestine, Afghanistan and Sudan.

A lawyer who specialises in international human rights law, he lived in Gaza in the 1990s.

Guardian &mdash October 31, 2023.

Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal: Why Israel's Gaza war is "a textbook case of genocide"

Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal says Israeli leaders' dehumanizing language about Palestinians in Gaza and the IDF's conduct are cause for alarm. "We're seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent. This is indeed a textbook case of genocide."