UNHRC experts call on international community to demand an end to violence, Israeli occupation 

A group of experts with the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is urging the international community to unite in calls for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and Israel and to then work to end Israel's occupation of Palestine. 

The experts said that "the denial of collective and individual rights of the Palestinian people" was the "underlying source" of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. 

The group also slammed the United States for blocking, for a third time, a joint UN Security Council statement calling for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. 

Here is an excerpt from their statement: 

"The underlying reality is that there is an occupying power, with one of the best equipped militaries in the world, ruling over an occupied people who have the right to be freed from an unwanted and protracted alien regime. This struggle is deeply unequal. The 54-year-old Israeli occupation – already the longest occupation in the modern world – is becoming even more entrenched and even more abusive of fundamental human rights. 

"After the last missile of this current violence has been fired, and after the tears from the last funeral have been shed, accountability must rise to the top of the agenda of the United Nations. The international community must ensure that Israel, the occupying power, complies fully with the more than 30 UN Security Council resolutions and the hundreds of General Assembly resolutions of which it is in breach.

"The enemies of accountability are impunity and exceptionalism. It is folly to expect that the justice, peace, equality and security which both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews have a right to enjoy can be achieved without imposing a meaningful cost on Israel, the occupying power, to fully end its illegal occupation."