The United Nations has charged that Israel has been burying radioactive nuclear waste in the occupied Golan Heights. Antonio Guterres is the U.N. Secretary General. He recently submitted a report for the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Fortieth Session which will begin in Geneva next week. He said in the report, “The Syrian Arab Republic noted that Israel continued to bury nuclear waste with radioactive content in 20 different areas populated by Syrian citizens of the occupied Syrian Golan, particularly in the vicinity of Al-Sheikh Mountain [Mt.Hermon]. The practice has put the lives and health of Syrians in the occupied Syrian Golan in jeopardy and constituted a serious violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” Syrian has been claiming for the last decade that Israel has been burying waste in the Heights.
Emmanuel Nahshon is a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. He said that the charge from Syria was “utter nonsense.” He added that the claim was “another false report from the UNHRC which specializes in attacking Israel” and that many of its member states “are bloody dictatorships hiding behind attacks against Israel in order not to allow scrutiny of their own human rights records.”
The Heights were captured from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and Arab nations. Israel formally annexed the Heights in 1981. The international community of nations has refused to recognize Israel’s right to the Heights. The U.N. has regularly demanded that Israel return the Heights to Syria.
The new U.N report also says that Israel is “providing logistical support to terrorist groups,” operating in the Heights such as the Nusrah Front. It charges that Israel is supplying “those groups with weapons, ammunition, money and medical care to frighten the local population and to maintain a no-go zone along the ceasefire lines.” Israel says that such claims are not true.
The report claims that “the decision of Israel to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration on the occupied Syrian Golan was null and void and without international legal effect” and “demanded that Israel rescind forthwith its decision.”
The office of the U.N. Secretary General says that it wrote the report at the request of the UNHRC and that it had only used information supplied by members of the U.N. There was no attempt to independently verify the contents of the report.
The U.N. report on the Heights will be debated as Agenda Item 7 at the annual UNHRC conference in the middle of March along with six other topics. Agenda Item 7 mandates that that the UNHRC must debate alleged Israeli human rights violation at every UNHRC session. Any charges of human rights violations made against any other country are debated under Agenda Item 4.
As usual, the UNHRC will hear more reports against actions taken by the Israeli government than any other country at the annual conference. The UNHRC also said that at this session, it will publish a controversial database of companies that are doing business with companies in areas of Israel that are beyond the pre-1967 borders. Israel has prevented the publication of this database before.