What started out as a World Health Organization meeting on the global response to the coronavirus outbreak on Thursday quickly veered into a four-hour Israel-bashing session, with some of the world's worst human rights abusers condemning the Jewish state.
According to a report by UN Watch, a Geneva-based nonprofit watchdog group, some 30 delegations, including those of Venezuela, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Malaysia, and Lebanon, ripped into Israel at the annual meeting of the UN body for allegedly violating the health rights of Palestinians and Syrians in the Golan Heights.
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The session concluded with a vote of 78 to 14, with 32 abstentions, to adopt a resolution, co-sponsored by Syria, Cuba, Turkey, Qatar, and the Palestinian delegation to the world body, requiring the WHO prepare another report on "health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan [Heights]" for its next annual meeting.
Israel's Ambassador to the UN in Geneva Meirav Eilon Shahar said it was "unfortunate" WHO member states had chosen once again to pass a "political" resolution against Israel, in particular at a time when the entire world was battling a pandemic.
UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer decried the "cynical politicization of the world's top health agency at the expense of focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic and other vital global health priorities and emergencies."
He noted that only one item on the agenda singled out a specific country, which was of course Israel.
The resolution was particularly galling, Neuer said, given that the UN's "own Middle East peace envoy [Nickolay Mladenov] had hailed Israel's 'excellent' coordination and cooperation with Palestinians amid the coronavirus pandemic."
Neuer was similarly dismissive of the claim that Israel routinely harms the health rights of Syrians fleeing President Bashar Assad's regime. He noted Israel's now-defunct program, Operation Good Neighbor, which provided medical treatment for thousands of Syrians in Israeli hospitals or treated them at the border when possible.
Despite the resolution's adoption, officials at the Foreign Ministry's headquarters in Jerusalem as well as Israel's Permanent Mission noted that many European countries that had once voted in favor of such resolutions had now either abstained or been absent during the vote.
In 2019, 96 countries voted to condemn the Jewish State, while this year 78 did so. The number of countries that voted against the resolution similarly increased from 11 in 2019 to 14 this year. This year, 32 countries abstained as opposed to 21 who did so in 2019.
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