Another Guantanamo Bay Detainee - Sami Haj

“For more than four years many of us have been isolated in a small cell, less that 10ft by 6ft, with the intense neon lights on 24 hours a day. Many of us are not allowed to exercise outside these cells for more than one hour, just once a week. We are provided with food and drinks which are not suitable for the iguanas and rats that live beside us on Torture Island.”

- Sami al-Hajj: reporting on life in Gitmo from Uprooted Palestinian Blogger

More cases of capital punishment - public stoning in Iran…

Execution by stoning aggravates the brutality of the death penalty. The stones used are specifically designed to increase the victim’s suffering. They are deliberately chosen to be large enough to cause pain, but not so large as to kill the victim immediately.

- Amnesty International Statement, Save two Iranians from public stoning

Why did the UN Human Rights Council single out Israel?

Robert Fisk, true to his incisive self, pointed out, what is inherently wrong with the current crisis in Middle East, in particular, Palestine, in his commentary, Welcome to ‘Palestine’.

As he said (and I paraphrase), Palestinians are punished for voting Hamas into office even though they are tired of the corrupt Fatah leadership which has bend over backwards to please the Americans and the Israelis. He then went on to describe how the situations are similar in other dictatorships: Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan who keeps ‘warlords and drug barons in his government’; or Hosni Mubarak of Egypt who silences dissent by jailing independent bloggers and the Muslim Brotherhood politicians.

This commentary follows the latest situation in Palestine in which Hamas gained control of Gaza Strip while President Abbas has the West bank. Former US President Jimmy Carter, addressing a human rights conference in Ireland on the 19th June, accused the U.S., Israel and the European Union on Tuesday of seeking to divide the Palestinian people by reopening aid only to Abbas but not to Hamas. In a AP report, he said,

“All efforts of the international community should be to reconcile the two, but there’s no effort from the outside to bring the two together”.

Meanwhile, according to another AP report dated 21 June, Israel has fired missiles and sent tanks on a foray into Gaza on Wednesday resulting in the death of four Palestinians; considered the ‘deadliest military action since Hamas militants took control of the coastal strip’.

On the UN front, the new UN Middle East Envoy, Michael Williams, according to the same newswire, but in a separate report, appears to recognise only the Abbas and his newly formed government. The report quoted him as saying,

“Despite what has happened, Gaza and the West Bank remain one Palestinian territory, legally administered by one Palestinian Authority headed of president Abbas.”

The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, was also reported to have criticised the Human Rights Council for picking on Israel. He joins the The European Union, Canada and the United States in criticising the council for singling-out Israel’s role in the occupied Palestinian territories for continued special investigation, under a deal reached in Geneva on Monday.

The 47 nation council, formed last year during the General Assembly to improve the UN image on human rights, in this latest report has strangely enough, removed accusations against Cuba and Belarus. Alejandro Wolff, deputy U.S. permanent representative at the UN, accused the council of “a pathological obsession with Israel”.

Just in case Mr Ban and Mr Wolff isn’t aware, the Israel government has been in violation of UN resolutions 465 and 476, which calls on the latter to stop the building of new illegal settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories amongst other demands. UN Resolution 465 and 476 was passed unanimously on March and June 1980 by the Security Council. Yet to date, the UN has done nothing to stop the Israeli authorities from imposing apartheid-like conditions in the Occupied Territories.

Maybe there is a reason why the UN Human rights council has singled out Israel for its human rights violation. Seriously, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.