Time to hold criminal Israeli officials accountable, Iran top rights official says
TEHRAN- The senior human rights official in Iran emphasized that the Islamic Republic is taking the issue seriously and demands that criminal Israeli officials should be held accountable for their crimes against the Palestinian people.
The remarks were made on Friday night during an interview with the Arabic-language al-Alam television news network by Kazem Gharibabadi, secretary of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights.
He went on to add, “Criminal officials of the Israeli regime must be tried. The Islamic Republic of Iran has placed particular focus on the issue, and Iranian lawyers and jurists have for this reason had interactions with their counterparts in other countries as part of attempts to follow up the case. The matter is also being pursued by judicial authorities of other Muslim states.”
The top Iranian human rights official continued by sternly denouncing some Muslim nations for their failure to sever diplomatic ties with the Tel Aviv regime, remove Israeli ambassadors, boycott Israeli-made goods, and place an embargo on all energy and oil exports to the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
“The issue of Palestine is currently the root cause of unity among Muslim states. Muslim countries are expected to alter their behavior, and put their words into actions,” Gharibabadi noted.
In a post in Farsi on the X platform on Monday, he also attacked governments and international organizations for failing to protect children in Gaza, where the Israeli regime has killed thousands of children as part of an ongoing war against the enclave.
“If they consider the children in Gaza to be part of the world’s children, it would be good for them to recognize the right of these oppressed children to a childhood, to continue to live and to grow,” Gharibabadi added.
During the Gaza conflict, the body has been active in a campaign to expose human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli regime.
Also, during a weekly news conference on Monday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said that the international community’s growing dissatisfaction with the conflict and desire for its end is seen by the mounting resistance to Israeli crimes in Gaza and the U.S. government’s support of the regime’s wrongdoings.
He also said that the U.S. and Israel have been forewarned by the resistance groups in the region that they would not stand idly by while the Israeli regime carrying out its atrocities on the Palestinian people in the beleaguered Gaza Strip.
“The actions of the Zionist regime spark a reaction by the resistance groups in the region. They (the groups) had repeatedly warned the U.S. and the Zionists that if these attacks continue, they will not remain silent,” he said.
“The U.S. and the Zionist regime must understand that they can escape the situation only by stopping the war completely and immediately, allowing the dispatch of humanitarian aid [to the coastal enclave], and ending the forced displacement of the people of Gaza.”
Additionally, the Iranian diplomat asked the U.S. administration to cease supporting Israeli atrocities in Gaza and focus on international security and peace rather than putting pressure on others to take action.
He pointed out that U.S. Congressmen have shown in recent years that they are willing to sacrifice the interests of the American people in favor of the Zionist regime.
With a population of over 2.3 million, estimates indicate that about half of Gaza residents are under the age of eighteen.
The situation of children in Gaza has piqued the interest of human rights campaigners and anti-war activists throughout the world, with rallies taking place nearly on a daily basis in Western capitals to pressure the Israeli regime to end its killing of women and children in the blockaded region.