Iton Gadol covered B’nai B’rith International’s defense of Israel before the UNHRC.

Read in Iton Gadol (in Spanish). Below is the translated text of the article in English.

During the first session of the United Nations Human Rights Council since the Hamas-led attack on October 7 in Israel, B’nai B’rith International challenged the international community to recognize critical truths about the current conflict in Gaza and Israel.

The statements were made on a day when the General Assembly in New York met in support of the U.N. agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and when a team of U.N. specialists recognized “credible information” about Hamas’s horrible sexual violence against Israeli women almost five months after the atrocities occurred.

In a video intervention, the director of Intercommunal Affairs and the U.N. of B’nai B’rith, David Michaels, told the Council: “The victimization of Hamas against citizens of 40 Arab, Israeli and Palestinian countries alike, has shown that anti-Israeli violence does not end with Israelis. And a wave of anti-Semitism worldwide has shown that anti-Israeli hatred cannot be separated from anti-Jewish hatred.”

“On October 7, representatives of Iran perpetrated the greatest atrocities among Jews since the Holocaust: torture, rape, decapitate and burn entire families and take hundreds more hostages, most of whom still remain in captivity. Since then, terrorists have fired thousands of rockets throughout Israel,” he continued.

“For those who blame the ‘occupation’ for the conflict, these groups attacked again from both southern and northern Israelic lands, where there was not a single Israeli soldier or settlement. Backed by a regime that seeks nuclear capabilities, they are openly committed to the total destruction of Israel. A quarter of a million Israelis have been displaced and millions more terrorized by endless attacks. Too many of those who express concern for non-Israeli civilians have shown their passion regarding Hamas and Hezbollah hiding and attacking each other and below them. Meanwhile, Israel has done more to facilitate aid and limit civilian casualties than any party in a comparable conflict in history,” he said.

“It’s time to finally free both one-year-old Kfir Bibas and the Arab children from the tyranny of the terrorists,” he concluded.

In another speech made at the Palace of Nations, headquarters of the Council, Anita Winter, representative of B’nai B’rith to the U.N. in Geneva, said: “Several special rapporteurs (of the U.N.) have asked for an arms embargo on the only Jewish State in the world, the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Winter pointed out that one of these rapporteurs, Francesca Albanese, who is dedicated to highlighting alleged violations of the rights of the Palestinians but not the rights of the Israelis, “has repeatedly said, after October 7, that she believes that Israel does not have the right to self-defense. And, before October 7, he said at a meeting affiliated with Hamas that they had a ‘right to resist’, knowing very well that his audience interpreted that phrase in the sense of violence and terrorism.”

And he continued: “Unfortunately, this call to impose an embargo on a besieged Israel is far from being an atypical case at the U.N. This same Council has inserted a similar language in its resolution ‘Guarantee accountability’, perhaps the most shamelessly partisan resolution of a UNHRC that condemns Israel more than all the other countries together and reserves a permanent issue on the agenda to censor a single country, the Jewish State.”

“Is this what the United Nations has become?” Winter asked. “A place where officials ignore, or worse, justify violence against Jews, while member states seek to ensure that Israel cannot effectively defend itself against the real threat of genocidal violence of Iran-sponsored terrorist representatives who sit Israel’s borders?”