Miloon Kothari, member of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, briefs reporters on the first report of the Commission. UN Photo/Jean Marc Ferré

The UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry (CoI) on Israel released its third report on Thursday detailing what it called “attacks, restrictions and harassment of civil society actors” by Israel.

The 22-page report accuses Israel of war crimes and finds that Israel’s suppression of civil society voices is “intrinsically linked to the goal of ensuring and enshrining the permanent occupation at the expense of the rights of the Palestinian people.”

Israel on Thursday denounced the report as a “prejudged narrative.”

“The claims and false accusations against Israel presented in the latest report are widely based on so-called public hearings which would be better described as kangaroo trials,” the Israeli Mission to the UN in Geneva said. “In just a year, this Commission and its three Commissioners have used antisemitic tropes, they have denied Israel’s right to exist as a member of the United Nations, they have attacked the widely embraced [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] IHRA working definition of antisemitism, and they have come out in support of [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement]. Their political activism only serves to advance pre-existing biased prejudices against Israel, under the guise of a supposedly independent UN mandate.”

The CoI report includes a citation that passively refers to the IHRA working definition of antisemitism as being “seen as highly controversial and problematic” despite its adoption by 40 countries and its embrace by the United States in the Biden Administration’s strategy to combat antisemitism announced in May. 

The report also declares boycotts of Israel to be legitimate and criticizes efforts to label the BDS movement as antisemitic.

“National laws and policies have been adopted in several countries enabling the labelling of critics of Israeli policies as antisemitic or criminalizing certain forms of legitimate protest, such as boycotts,” the report says. “For example, on 19 November 2020, the United States Secretary of State announced that the Department of State would designate as ‘antisemitic’ organizations that engaged in boycotts against Israel.”

The report describes such laws as limiting freedom of expression and efforts to speak out for Palestinian rights. US courts have repeatedly found that freedom of speech does not extend to a right to an economic boycott. 

US Congresswoman Ann Wagner (R-MO), who in February co-led a bipartisan Congressional letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calling for the CoI to be dissolved, told The Algemeiner she also condemned Thursday’s report.

“Any report created by an illegitimate body with a biased and corrupt head, should be ignored and discredited in the public sphere,” Wagner said.

While the report found that Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas were all responsible for violations against civil society actors, the report overwhelmingly focuses on the actions of Israel. Despite accusing security officials in Gaza of widespread torture, it does not name those officials as belonging to the Hamas terrorist group. The only references to terrorism in the report are related to what it describes as Israel’s “unlawful” application of counter-terrorism laws, including Israel’s designation of seven Palestinian NGOs for their alleged connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist group.

Formally titled “the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel,” the CoI and its commissioners have repeatedly been accused of antisemitism and bias against Israel since the commission was established in a 2021 UN Human Rights Council resolution.

One of those commissioners, Miloon Kothari, was forced to apologize in August after saying in an interview that social media was “controlled largely by the Jewish lobby” and said he “would go as far as to raise the question of why [Israel is] even a member of the United Nations.”

In response, a bipartisan group of US members of Congress led by Rep. Wagner and Rep. Brad Schneider (D-CA) called for the commission to be dissolved.

“The COI is an unprecedented, open-ended, and unfairly slanted investigation, which completely ignores the role of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” wrote 18 Congressional representatives in a February letter. “From its inception in 2021, this commission has been a clear attempt by the United Nations Human Rights Council to target Israel.”