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| - Fact Check: Video of Israel UN envoy tearing human rights report is from 2021
India Today Fact Check found that the incident predates the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict that began on October 7, 2023.
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India Today Fact Check
This video is from October 2021 and is unrelated to the current conflict.
A post circulating on social media purports to show that amidst the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, the United Nations issued a 20-page notice to Israel for human rights violations. The post also alleges that Israel's UN representative tore down this notice. The post is accompanied by a video showing a man tearing a piece of paper while standing at a podium.
“This report, and it should have no place in anybody concerned with human rights, security or peace. Its only place is in the dustbin of antisemitism, and that is exactly how we shall treat it,” the man can be heard saying while tearing the document.
A tweet containing the video said, “BIG BREAKING: UN issued a 20-page notice to Israel, accusing them of human rights violations. Israeli representatives took the notice, tore it up, and threw it away, stating that terrorists have no human rights.”
India Today found that this video is two years old and unrelated to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Our Probe
With the help of a keyword search, we found multiple media reports about the incident from October 2021. According to the Palestine Post, Israeli Envoy to the UN, Erdan Gilad, tore up the UN Human Rights Council’s annual report while at the UN General Assembly in October 2021. Reportedly, Gilad tore the report claiming it was biased against Israel.
As per the Jerusalem Post, while addressing the General Assembly, Gilad alleged that since the establishment of the Human Rights Council in 2006, it had issued a total of 142 condemnations against member states of the United Nations. Out of these condemnations, 95 were specifically directed at Israel, involving the passing of four resolutions against Israel.
Reportedly, Gilad also said the UN had a history of anti-Israel bias and referred to the 1975 General Assembly resolution that labelled Zionism as racism, a designation later revoked in 1991.
A one-minute 29-second video of his speech was shared by Gilad on Twitter on October 30, 2021. The now-viral clip can be seen around the one-minute mark. “Today, I addressed the @UN General Assembly and spoke out against the baseless, one-sided, and outright false accusations from the Human Rights Council's annual report,” Gilad wrote while sharing the video.
In the video, Gilad can be heard saying, “It was on this stage, at this very body, that the very right of the Jewish people to have a national home was itself declared to be racist. A decision that was justly overturned. A decision that Israel’s ambassador at the time, Chaim Herzog, tore up before the United Nations.”
He further added, “And this is exactly what should be done to this anti-Semitic, distorted, one-sided report. Just as that 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism was itself a gross form of anti-Jewish racism, which has no place in this international body, so too, the Human Rights Council’s obsessive anti-Israel bias, embodied once again by this report, should have no place in anybody concerned with human rights, security, or peace. Its only place is in the dustbin of anti-Semitism, and that is precisely how we shall treat it.”
Thus, it is clear that the video in question is nearly two years old and predates the ongoing conflict.
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