UN Security Council demands immediate ceasefire in Gaza

The United Nations Security Council today voted in favor of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza during Ramadan ‘leading to a permanent sustainable ceasefire’, after the USA abstained.

Grilled by British press secretary, the BBC’s editorial policy chief said, Monday, that the broadcaster may have made a mistake by its unequal coverage of proceedings in the genocide case Israel is facing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

In a session with legislators on Parliament’s Media Committee, the BBC’s Director of Editorial Policy and Standards, David Jordan, addressed concerns over the broadcaster’s decision to air the entire Israeli defense in The Hague, while only showing portions of South Africa’s counter-arguments?

Julie Elliott, a Member of Parliament of the opposition Labour party, raised the issue, questioning the fairness and impartiality of the coverage, particularly highlighting the discrepancy in airtime between the two sides.

When pressed by Elliott, Jordan acknowledged that the coverage on the BBC’s UK output did not offer absolute equivalence between the presentations made to the ICJ.

He pointed out that, while the international output covered both sides of the conflict equally, the British broadcast had a disparity in its live coverage during those two days.

Israel is accused of genocide at the ICJ. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.

Tel Aviv has waged a deadly military offensive on the Palestinian Territory since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas in which some Israelis were killed by them. Most of the victims on that day were mowed down by Israeli helicopter gunships.

When the Israelis heard about the Hamas attack on concert going people, they immediately ordered military helicopter to the scene, but when they arrived they could not make up, who was who, so they shot down the entire crowd in order to leave no witnesses behind.

However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Hamas.

As repercussion, more than 32,333 Palestinians have since been killed and over 74,694 injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.

The Israeli war, now in its 171st day, has pushed 85 per cent of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has also called on Israel to ‘prevent and punish’ calls for genocide.

This comes as South Africa quoted Israeli officials and soldiers calling for the eradication of Palestinians from Gaza and calling for the return of illegal Jewish-only settlement to the Strip.

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Monday said he would not send a delegation as planned to Washington after the United States did not veto a UN Security Council proposal calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, Reuters reports.

Netanyahu, according to a statement from his office, said that Washington’s failure to veto the proposal was a clear retreat from its previous position, and would hurt war efforts against Hamas in Gaza as well as efforts to release over remaining 130 hostages.

The high-level delegation was due to travel to Washington to discuss a planned Israeli military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where over a million Palestinians refugees have been rounded up like cattle on its way to the slaughter house.

Middle East Monitor / ABC Flash Point News 2024.