Source: – HYPERLINK http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/conferences/hrc2006/five/hrc070613pm1-eng.rm?start=02:16:35&end=02:18:34 http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/conferences/hrc2006/five/hrc070613pm1-eng.rm?start=02:16:35&end=02:18:34 
Date: June 13, 2007

Right of Reply of Lebanon to Israel during the interactive dialogue on the Report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on the follow-up to the report of the Commission of Inquiry on Lebanon

Thank you Mr. President.  You requested repeatedly sir to keep this council untainted, untarnished by inflammatory speeches.  I regret to take the floor to react to one of them.  I noted that the inflammatory remarks of the representative of Israel disregarded the basic fact that the emergence of Hezbollah is a phenomenon fully due to the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, to Israeli aggression and repeated violation and breaches of Lebanon’s sovereignty until this moment.  We too Mr. President have the right as people and government to ask for accountability and cessation of impunity as regard Israeli practices against Lebanon.  Justice in the Middle East is a handicap like the chairs symbolizing handicaps displayed a few blocks away in Place des Nations: it has been abducted by Israel the occupying force.  Redressing this fact requires Israel to abide scrupulously and unequivocally by the relevant Security Council resolution without double standards as well as accepting the Beirut Arab peace initiative.  A conflict indeed took place last summer in Lebanon and the Lebanese government showed the goodwill to address it.  Yet, its goal was ignored and the disproportionate reaction of Israel turned it into a whole military campaign against Lebanon, its people, its infrastructure, thereby wiping out 15 years of development.  Beyond reasonable doubts, gross and systematic violations of international humanitarian law were committed when IDF resorted inter-alia to the indiscriminate use of 4 million cluster sub-munitions against the Lebanese people, representing one for each citizen.  I wonder whether those deliberate actions were not an attempt to exterminate the whole nation through collective punishment and war crimes well documented and established.  Finally, Mr. President I wish to remind Israel of an Arab saying: “The Camel does not see its own hump.”  I thank you sir.