Israel on Feb. 5 withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), citing “ongoing and unrelenting institutional bias” against the Jewish state.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, in a social media post announcing the withdrawal, cited President Donald Trump’s decision announced the previous day to pull the United States out of the council.
“Israel joins the United States and will not participate in the UNHRC,” Sa'ar wrote.
Neither the United States nor Israel are among the group’s 47 members but, like all U.N. members, have informal observer status and a seat in the council meeting chamber.
One of the U.N.’s top officials on the Palestinian region decried Israel’s move as “extremely serious.”
“It shows the hubris and lack of realization of what they have done. They insist in self-righteousness, that they have nothing to be held accountable for, and they are proving it to the entire international community,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Albanese said she feared that Israel’s military actions, which she alleged to be a “genocide” against the Palestinians, would expand and intensify in the West Bank, which Palestinians want along with Gaza as the core of a future independent state.
In a letter to UNHRC President Jorg Lauber, Sa'ar said bias against Israel had been ongoing since the group’s inception in 2006.
“The UNHRC has traditionally protected human rights abusers by allowing them to hide from scrutiny, and instead obsessively demonizes the one democracy in the Middle East—Israel,” Sa'ar said in his post on the X platform.
“This body has focused on attacking a democratic country and propagating anti-Semitism instead of promoting human rights.”
Sa'ar noted that several countries known to have human rights violations received fewer council resolutions against them than Israel.
“The discrimination against us is clear: In the UNHRC, Israel is the only country with an agenda item dedicated solely to it. Israel has been subjected to over 100 condemnatory resolutions, over 20 percent of all resolutions ever passed in the Council—more than against Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela combined. Israel will not accept this discrimination any longer!”
Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Daniel Meron, told reporters that the council “has been a biased body since its beginning, where dictatorships lecture democracies on human rights.”
“Israel remains committed to human rights and will engage through credible, non-politicized mechanisms,” Meron said.
Council members have frequently alleged Israeli human rights violations in its war in Gaza against the Hamas terrorist group. A U.N. inquiry it set up found last year the scale of killings amounted to a crime against humanity.
Israel rejected the finding and says it takes care to avoid civilian casualties. Many of Gaza’s large displacements of people took place after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warned residents of specific areas to leave in advance of a coming offensive, according to the IDF.
Trump announced on Feb. 4 that the United States would withdraw from the Human Rights Council and also would not resume funding of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that addresses Palestinians and is the largest employer in the Gaza Strip.
The United States previously froze payments to UNRWA in 2018, during Trump’s first term. It was restored under the Biden administration but stopped again after it was shown that at least nine agency employees participated in terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Trump pulled the United States out of the Human Rights Council in June 2018. Nikki Haley, then U.N. ambassador, accused the council of “chronic bias against Israel” and pointed to what she said were human rights abusers among its members.
Biden renewed support for the council, and the United States won a seat on it in October 2021. However, his administration announced in September 2024 that it would not seek another term.
