GENEVA: UN investigators probing rights violations in Israel and the Palestinian territories said Thursday they hoped US President Donald Trump‘s new Board of Peace could finally open the door to field visits.
Israeli authorities have blocked the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry (CoI), which found Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, from conducting investigations on the ground.
Speaking just before the US president unveiled his new Board of Peace at the World Economic Forum in Davos, CoI chairman Srinivasan Muralidhar said of the Trump-brokered plan to end the war in Gaza: “We don’t find anything there that can possibly hinder the work of this commission.”
The commission was set up in 2021 by the UN Human Rights Council, but Israel has refused to cooperate with the open-ended probe.
“With this peace plan in place, it’s only a hope that that might change. We might have some cooperation from those who will be controlling the affairs of that zone of conflict,” Muralidhar told a press conference in Geneva.
“We would expect them to trust us to do our investigation in the most professional way.”
Muralidhar has written to the Israeli and Palestinian authorities to request their cooperation with the newly reconfigured three-member commission.
Muralidhar, an Indian judge, now chairs the CoI, which is UN-mandated but does not speak for the United Nations itself.
New commissioner Florence Mumba, from Zambia, was a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1997.
Australian human rights lawyer Chris Sidoti continues in his post.
The commission was previously chaired by Navi Pillay, a South African former judge who previously served as UN rights chief.
In September last year, under Pillay, the CoI found Israeli authorities and forces had committed “four of the five genocidal acts” listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention since October 2023 in Gaza.
That drew harsh criticism from Israel.
The commission is not a legal body, but its reports wield diplomatic pressure and serve to gather evidence for later use by courts.
“It is definitely open to any further body that might want to use that as evidence to come to its own conclusions,” said Muralidhar.
© New Straits Times Press (M) Bhd
