In an emergency session that began Monday afternoon and continued into Tuesday morning, the representatives of the UN Security Council discussed a response to Israel’s violent raid against the Freedom Flotilla on Monday.The Security Council meeting included a change in the head of the Council, which took place at midnight as the month changed from May to June. At that point in the meeting, the Mexican representative, Claude Heller, assumed the Presidency of the Security Council and stated, ‘Several of us, we have insisted, since the beginning, for an independent, credible and impartial investigation.’
The final outcome of the meeting included this call for an independent investigation of the Israeli attack, which left a number of people dead – due to the Israeli media blackout and censorship of the incident, the exact number of dead and their identities is not known at this time.
U.S. Deputy U.N. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff held firm to the Obama administration position that there should be no investigation of the incident, saying, ‘We are convinced and support an Israeli investigation, as I called for in my statement earlier. And, have every confidence that Israel can conduct a credible and impartial and transparent, prompt, investigation internally.’
This is despite evidence that past Israeli investigations of similar deadly incidents have been flawed – including recently released evidence that the Israeli investigation of its military’s killing of US citizen Rachel Corrie in 2003 involved extensive coverups and failures to actually investigate the incident.
The Security Council’s statement reiterated the importance of implementing UN Resolution 1860, which calls for the unrestricted flow of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, which has been prevented by Israel in its three-year long blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli government has previously ignored Resolution 1860, along with hundreds of other UN Resolutions calling on the state to adhere to international law and past signed agreements, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, which governs the treatment of occupied populations by military occupiers. Israeli forces have militarily occupied the Palestinian Territories, the West Bank and Gaza, since 1967, and have, in that time, ignored virtually every UN resolution passed to try to push Israel to adhere to its obligations as an occupying power.
