Thousands hold pro-Palestinian rally called by Erdogan: UN votes to send war crimes probe to Gaza

ISTANBUL: Thousands of people on Friday massed in Istanbul for a rally called by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to show solidarity with the Palestinians and condemn Israel after its deadly shootings of Gaza protesters, an AFP correspondent said.

Large crowds thronged the massive Yenikapi meeting area on the shores of the sea of Marmara under the slogan "Curse the oppression, support al-Quds ", ahead of an address by Erdogan.

The rally came hours ahead of an extraordinary summit meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) also called by Erdogan to denounce Israel’s actions and the moving of the US embassy for Israel from Tel Aviv to l-Quds.

Demonstrators held Palestinian and Turkish flags and brandished slogans like "al-Quds is our red line". Some of the leaders and ministers set to attend the summit were present at the rally, including Palestinian prime minister Rami Hamdallah.

"We are calling on the world and say ‘Israel, America and Zionism, you all dragged humanity into chaos’," said protestor Levent Ayaz. "With God’s permission, al-Quds belongs to us and is the capital of Islam as long as this ummah (Islamic community) exists," he added.

"There is no political view here, there is no right, there’s no left," said fellow demonstrator Recep Kerven. "The only reason we are here is to support our (Palestinian) brothers. That’s a message delivered to the entire world."

Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Council voted on Friday to send a team of international war crimes investigators to probe the deadly shootings of Gaza protesters by Israeli forces. The UN’s top human rights body voted through a resolution calling on the council to "urgently dispatch an independent, international commission of inquiry" -- the UN rights council’s highest-level of investigation.

Only two of the council’s 47 members, the United States and Australia, voted against the resolution, while 29 voted in favour and 14 abstained, including Britain, Switzerland and Germany. The text said the team should investigate all alleged violations and abuses... in the context of the military assaults on large scale civilian protests that began on 30 March 2018, ... including those that may amount to war crimes."

The special UN session comes after six weeks of mass protests and clashes along the Gaza border with Palestinian refugees demanding the right to return to their former homes inside what is now Israel.

The violence has claimed more than 100 Gazan lives, with 60 Palestinians killed and thousands injured in a single day of protests that coincided with Monday’s move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to al-Quds.

Opening the special session earlier on Friday, UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein slammed the "wholly disproportionate" use of force by Israeli troops and backed the call for an international probe. "Nobody has been made safer by the horrific events of the past week," he said.

But Zeid insisted that many of those injured and killed on Monday "were completely unarmed, (and) were shot in the back, in the chest, in the head and limbs with live ammunition", he said, saying there was "little evidence of any (Israeli) attempt to minimise casualties".

He said, "some of the demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails, used slingshots to throw stones, flew burning kites into Israel and attempted to use wire-cutters against the two fences between Gaza and Israel."

But he added: "these actions alone do not appear to constitute the imminent threat to life or deadly injury which could justify the use of lethal force." Israel has justified its actions, arguing it was necessary to stop mass infiltrations from the blockaded Palestinian enclave which is run by the Islamist Hamas movement.