WHO Coronavirus Meeting Descends Into Singling Out Of Israel As ‘health Rights Violator’

What started as a World Health Organization (WHO) update meeting on the global response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, veered into a four-hour Israel bashing session, with some of the world’s worst human rights abusers condemning the Jewish state.

Meeting at the annual assembly of the United Nation’s (UN) WHO, some 30 delegations including Venezuela, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Malaysia and Lebanon, ripped into Israel for “allegedly violating the health rights of Palestinians and Syrians in the Golan Heights,” according to a UN Watch report.

The session concluded with a vote of 78 to 14, with 32 abstentions, to adopt a resolution, co-sponsored by Syria, Cuba, Turkey, Qatar and the Palestinian delegation, requiring the WHO to hold the same debate at next year’s assembly, and to prepare another report on the “Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.”

Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based NGO UN Watch decried the “cynical politicization of the world’s top health agency at the expense of focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic and other vital global health priorities and emergencies.”

He said that only one item on the agenda singled out a specific country – Israel – not focusing on civil war, conflict or political strife. It is not through lack of choice; Syrian hospitals have been repeatedly bombed by Russian and Syrian hospitals; without urgent assistance, up to 15 million Yemenites may face imminent starvation and Venezuela’s health care system has collapsed. In the case of the latter, UN investigators have charged that President Nicolas Maduro’s regime is guilty of crimes against humanity.

Neuer maintained that far from Israel abusing Palestinian health rights, the exact opposite is true. The attack seemed additionally galling, considering that the UN’s “own Middle East peace envoy hailed Israel’s ‘excellent’ coordination and cooperation with Palestinians amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

UN Watch’s executive director was similarly dismissive of the claim that Israel routinely harms the health rights of Syrians fleeing to the Golan from President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime. Israel’s now-defunct program, Operation Good Neighbor, either secretly provided medical treatment for thousands of Syrians in Israeli hospitals or treated them at the border if they could.