At least seven dead in Israeli attacks on the “security zone” in the Gaza Strip

Israeli forces may have repeatedly violated the laws of war in the Gaza conflict and failed to distinguish between civilians and combatants, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Wednesday.

Separately, the head of a UN investigation accused the Israeli military of carrying out the “extermination” of the Palestinians.

In a report on six Israeli attacks that caused numerous casualties and destroyed civilian infrastructure, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said Israeli forces “may have systematically violated the principles of distinction, proportionality and caution in attacks”.

“The requirement to select means and methods of warfare in such a way as to avoid or at least minimize harm to the civilian population was apparently consistently violated in Israel’s bombing raids,” said Volker Turk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Israel’s permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva said the analysis was “factually, legally and methodologically flawed.”

“Since the OHCHR has at best an incomplete picture of the facts, any attempt to draw legal conclusions is inherently flawed,” the Israeli mission said.

At a separate meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the head of a UN fact-finding mission, Navi Pillay, said those responsible for human rights violations in the conflict must be held accountable.

She reiterated the findings of a report released last week that both Hamas fighters and Israel had committed war crimes, but said Israel alone was responsible for the most serious violations of international law, known as “crimes against humanity.”

She said the scale of casualties among the Palestinian civilian population amounted to “extermination”.

“We concluded that the immense number of civilian casualties in Gaza and the widespread destruction of civilian objects and infrastructure were the inevitable result of a deliberate strategy to inflict maximum damage,” Ms Pillay, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said at the meeting in Geneva.

-Reuters