UN chief inspector: I hope Israeli leaders will one day be behind bars.
From AFP, Navi Pillay, a former South African judge who presided over the 1994 Rwandan genocide trial and also served as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, acknowledged that justice was “slow.”
In an interview with AFP, the independent UN investigator cited the words of Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid icon in South Africa, who said that “everything seems impossible until it is done.”
Expressing hope that Israeli leaders would be prosecuted, she stressed: “I do not consider it impossible that there will be arrests and trials in the future.”
Navi Pillay’s independent international commission of inquiry released a report on Tuesday saying that “genocide is taking place in Gaza,” a claim that Israel denies.
The researchers also concluded that Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant were “agents of genocide (in the Gaza Strip).”
The Israeli government rejected the findings, calling the report “distorted and inaccurate,” but Navi Pillay insists that the similarities between the events in Gaza and Rwanda, where an estimated 800,000 people were massacred, are clear.
As president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, she said that seeing images of the killing and torture of civilians had affected her “for the rest of her life.”