Israeli troops were ordered to use live fire on the 40,000 people who protested both the US’s embassy move to Jerusalem and the Nakba, or “catastrophe”. South Africa and Turkey recalled their ambassadors to the country, and Belgium has summoned Israeli ambassador Simona Frankel over her comments that all those killed were “terrorists”. Turkey also took the step of expelling the Israeli ambassador to Ankara for an undetermined length of time.
The UK has called on the UN to launch an investigation into why “such a volume” of live ammunition was used against unarmed Palestinian protesters, but stopped short of linking the deaths of protesters to Washington’s decision to move its embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The UN Security Council will meet later on Tuesday to discuss the violence, though it is not clear what action might come out of the session. The killings betray both Gaza’s desperation after 11 years of a crippling blockade and the Israeli military’s heavy-handed tactics, human rights organisations said.
“The policy of Israeli authorities to fire irrespective of whether there is an immediate threat to life on Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza, caged in for a decade and under occupation for half a century, has resulted in a bloodbath anyone could have foreseen,” Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, said in a statement.
0 Comments