Israel today called for a UN inquiry into its 50-day war in Gaza last summer to be shelved as its chairman quit over Israeli accusations of conflict of interest.
Canadian international law expert William Schabas tendered his resignation yesterday after Israel complained that he had prepared a legal opinion for the Palestine Liberation Organisation in October 2012, the United Nations said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the departure of a man he said was "biased against Israel" but said the whole investigation needed to be abandoned as it had been commissioned by the UNHRC, which he described as an "anti-Israel body".
"After the resignation of the committee chairman who was biased against Israel, the report that was written at the behest of the UN Human Rights Council -- an anti-Israel body, the decisions of which prove it has nothing to do with human rights -- needs to be shelved," Netanyahu said.
"This is the same council that in 2014 made more decisions against Israel than against Iran, Syria and North Korea combined."
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Schabas's resignation would make little difference to the inquiry's outcome.
"It won't change the committee's report's conclusions, which were biased in advance in accordance with the body that formed the committee, whose sole purpose is attacking and harming Israel," he said.
Israel has long had stormy relations with the UNHRC.
In January 2012, it became the first country to refuse to attend a periodic review of its human rights record. And two months later, it cut all ties with the council over its plans to probe how Jewish settlements were harming Palestinian rights.
In November, it announced that it would not cooperate with Schabas's investigation because of the "obsessive hostility against Israel of this commission and the words of its president against Israel and its leaders."
The Gaza conflict ended with a truce between Israel and the territory's Islamist de facto rulers Hamas on August 26 after the deaths of more than 2,140 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and 73 people on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers.
