The United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday named American jurist Professor David Crane to head a special commission tasked with investigating the violence on the Israel-Gaza Strip border in recent months.
At least 130 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military since March 30 when Hamas, the terrorist group that rules Gaza, launched its border riot campaign.
The U.N. Human Rights Council voted in May to set up the probe into the border events, to the fury of Israel, which said it was being demonized.
Israel's military and political leadership have defended the use of live fire against rioters and have presented evidence showing hundreds of Palestinians torching tires and throwing stones, firebombs and explosives at IDF troops. Some have tried using the thick smoke to breach the security fence and stage terrorist attacks against soldiers and civilians living in border-adjacent communities.
Israel has presented further proof that Hamas was paying protesters, especially teenagers, to charge the Gaza border and clash with IDF troops.
Crane, who will lead the three-person Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, is a law professor at Syracuse University who the U.N. said had over 30 years' experience in the U.S. federal government, including as a senior inspector general in the Department of Defense.
"Professor Crane served as Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone from April 2002 until 15 July 2005, during which period he indicted, among others, the then-President of Liberia, Charles Taylor," a U.N. statement said.
His co-commissioners will be Sara Hossain, a Bangladeshi lawyer who formerly worked on U.N. investigations into human rights in North Korea, and Kaari Betty Murungi, a board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and previously a legal adviser at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
The commissioners will present a final written report in March next year.
The U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process Nickolay Mladenov told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that he had visited Gaza over the past week in an urgent effort to de-escalate tensions.
"I appealed to Palestinian factions not to provoke incidents at the fence, to immediately stop the firing of rockets and mortars and to stop the incendiary kites and balloons. And I appealed to Israel to reopen the crossings, stop shelling, particularly in populated areas, and to exercise restraint toward Gaza," he said.
"Over the last two weeks, however, the situation quickly spiraled out of control, nearly to a point of no return."
Intense efforts by the United Nations and Egypt had calmed the situation, Mladenov said, but only in the short term.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman declined to comment on the UNHRC investigation.
