Livni in London: We expect UNHRC report to be 'twisted and anti-Israel'

in London, former foreign minister defends Israel to key British officials.

By GIL STERN STERN HOFFMAN
Updated: JUNE 16, 2015 04:27
Tzipi Livni (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Tzipi Livni
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Ahead of this week’s release of the UN report on Operation Protective Edge, former foreign minister Tzipi Livni traveled to London Monday to defend Israel to key British officials.
Livni, who was justice minister and a member of the security cabinet during the operation, presented the Foreign Ministry’s report on what happened in the Gaza Strip last summer to British Minister for the Middle East and North Africa Tobias Ellwood and Foreign Office director- general Simon Gass.
“It is important that the British government have an accurate picture of the factual, ethical, and legal reality, because the UN report is expected to be so twisted and anti-Israel,” Livni told Ellwood.
Livni, who came to London for a conference on the “world’s strongest women,” also met with journalists and other influential figures and spoke to them about the Gaza Strip report.
Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid said the report was “born in sin, and it should be treated as such.” He told his faction in the Knesset that the United Nations is an organization that has lost its mind.
“A quarter of a million people dead in Syria, Iraq is falling apart, beheadings in Saudi Arabia, a million dead in Sudan, Libya has ceased to exist as a functioning state – and only Israel is obsessively investigated again and again and again, always with the assumption that the Jews are to blame for everything,” Lapid said.
“If that isn’t their approach, then how do they explain the fact that the mandate of the investigation starts on June 13? For those who don’t remember, that’s one day after the kidnapping of Gil- Ad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrah, may their memories be blessed. They decided not to investigate that sickening act by Palestinian terrorists. If that isn’t hypocrisy, then I don’t know what is.”
Lapid asked: In the history of warfare, has there been a military that has done more than the IDF to prevent civilian casualties, that has called people to leave their homes so they will not be harmed, or that builds a field hospital for its enemies during an operation, on the edge of the battlefield? “Last week I was at the United Nations with our delegation there,” Lapid said. “I was given an in-depth briefing by them on the crucial work that they’re doing. It’s not the IDF, the most moral army in the world, which should be investigated but the UN itself.
How did it get to a situation in which it lost its honesty, its moral standards, and the basic values for which it was created?” Education Minister Naftali Bennett told his Bayit Yehudi faction that it is time to go on the offensive against the UN’s Gaza probe.
“Even when we’re under attack, we’re still right,” Bennett said. “We have nothing to apologize for.”
Yisrael Beytenu head Avigdor Liberman said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should react to the report by leaving the United Nations Human Rights Council, which he said “only exists for hypocrisy.”
Liberman accused Netanyahu of destroying the Foreign Ministry, calling what he did to the ministry a “pogrom” and a “lynching.”