The top human rights official at the UN condemned Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip in an especially forceful statement Thursday and warned that an assault on Rafah would add a new level of horror to the war.

The terror attacks by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups on October 7 were “appalling and entirely wrong”, said Volker Türk, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights. But, he added, “So is the brutality of the Israeli response.”

He laid out the toll of Israel’s military campaign: what the UN estimates is 100,000 dead, injured or missing Palestinians, amounting to 1 in 20 of Gaza’s people; the unprecedented number of deaths of UN employees and journalists; and about 17,000 Palestinian children orphaned or separated from their families.

“There appear to be no bounds to, no words to capture, the horrors that are unfolding before our eyes in Gaza,” he said in an address to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. “This is carnage.”

Türk was opening a council discussion of a report by his office on developments in Gaza and the West Bank, highlighting the human and physical devastation of the war in Gaza and the “profoundly discriminatory systems of control” and “endless humiliation” of Israel’s policies in occupied territories.

His statement drew a rebuke from Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, who condemned it as “an affront” to the victims of the October 7 attack.

Eilon Shahar said that the UN and the council had ignored Israel’s security concerns for years, and she noted that Türk’s statement did not mention the hundreds of Israelis killed in attacks before and after October 7. “Do they not matter?” she asked.

Eilon Shahar defended Israel’s campaign, saying its approach to dealing with terrorist groups that were using civilians as human shields was consistent with international law. Turning to acknowledge two former hostages behind her, Aviva Siegel and Raz Ben-Ami, whose husbands are still being held in Gaza, she said the high commissioner had reduced them to “a mere footnote” in the council’s discourse.

Türk said Israel’s blockade and siege of Gaza amounted to collective punishment of its population, which is a war crime and could amount to using starvation as a weapon of war, also a war crime. “All people in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine,” he said.

New York Times News Service