http://www.defence.lk/new.asp?fname=Israel_to_bar_UN_fact_finding_team_from_entering_20120329_04

Israel to bar UN fact-finding team from entering
(By: AMY
TEIBEL Associated Press)
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel cut working relations with the United
Nations Human Rights Council on Monday and will bar a U.N. team from entering
Israel or the West Bank for a planned investigation of Jewish settlements, the
Foreign Ministry said.
Israel accuses the council of having a pronounced anti-Israel
bias because of what it says is its disproportionate focus on Israeli policy
toward the Palestinians.
Israeli leaders have been in an uproar over the council's
adoption of a resolution last week condemning Jewish settlement construction in
the West Bank and east Jerusalem and its decision to send a fact-finding mission
to investigate.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced Israel
was severing working ties with the council.
"It means that we're not going to work with them. We're not
going to let them carry out any kind of mission for the Human Rights Council,
including this probe," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said he was not
surprised by the Israeli move.
"Israel never cooperated with all fact finding missions that
were sent and established by the U.N. to investigate the Israeli atrocities
against the Palestinians," he said after meeting his Danish counterpart in
Copenhagen.
Much of the international community sees settlement construction
on occupied lands the Palestinians seek for a future state as a major impediment
to peacemaking, and has pressured Israel to freeze it.
Israel has moved 500,000 Israelis to the West Bank and east
Jerusalem since capturing the areas, along with Gaza, in the 1967 Mideast war.
Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, though it still
controls access by air, sea and land, except for a crossing between Gaza and
Egypt.
The Palestinians say continued settlement expansion pre-empts
the outcome of negotiations. Israel, which refuses to halt construction, says
the fate of settlements and the related issue of the final borders of a Jewish
and a Palestinian state must be determined through negotiations, not demands.
Since its creation in 2006, the Geneva-based council has focused
heavily on alleged abuses by Israel. After the United States joined in 2009, the
council has increasingly addressed human rights problems in other countries.
Last year, it created a special investigator for Iran, held emergency meetings
on Libya and Syria and dispatched teams of experts to probe abuses in those
countries.
On the same day it called for an investigation of the
settlements, the council approved four other resolutions critical of Israel.
The council will likely keep passing resolutions on Israel while
the occupation of Palestinian land continues, its president, Uruguayan diplomat
Laura Dupuy Lasserre, said last week.
Israel has had uneasy relations with the U.N. for decades, in
large part because of the pro-Palestinian majority in the General Assembly,
though the United States has used its veto power multiple times to block
anti-Israel resolutions in the Security Council. Israel halted its marginal
funding to UNESCO in the fall after the U.N. cultural agency recognized
Palestine as a member.
Relations with the U.N. were especially acrimonious over a
U.N.-commissioned report by South African jurist Richard Goldstone on Israel's
military offensive in Gaza three years ago, aimed at stopping daily rocket
attacks. Israel refused to cooperate with Goldstone's team, though it didn't bar
it from entering.
Associated Press writers Frank Jordans in Geneva and Jan M.
Olsen in Copenhagen contributed reporting.
Courtesy: Associated Press