BIRMINGHAM, England

Irish President Michael Higgins has suggested Israel and countries that supply it with weaponry should be excluded from the United Nations.

The comments came after a team of independent experts commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Speaking to reporters shortly after the announcement of the report, Higgins said: "I think it's a very, very important document, and of course, the chair of that working group was the chair of the working group on Rwanda, and it explicitly states that four of the main actions as referred to in the 1948 convention on genocide are met.

"It goes further and suggests that the incitement to genocide has been present, and it specifically mentions those in high office who use language to encourage and incite genocide.

"I have spoken so often about it, and I'm coming to what is a celebration of the production of food in all its different ways, and when you think of all the people killed yesterday and today, half of them women and children."

The Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, after two years of investigations into events since Oct. 7, 2023, concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces committed "four of the five" genocidal acts defined under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Commenting on the findings of the report, Higgins has criticized the European Union (EU), saying: “I believe the EU will find it extraordinarily difficult to ever be a union in any sense again when some of its strongest members are deciding to stay silent in watching emaciated children in what is a human, manmade, really atrocious infliction on people.

"That report says 90% of all housing has been destroyed, education facilities have been destroyed, and health care facilities and fertility facilities are being destroyed—in other words, you're attacking birth."

Higgins called on the world to increase the pressure on Israel to "stop this carnage" and the "slaughter of civilians."

The Israeli army has continued a brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip, killing nearly 65,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, and experts have declared a famine there.