The UN Human Rights Council voted to set up a commission to investigate Israel"s deadly crackdown on protesters in Gaza UN Human Rights chief says the stark contrast in casualties on both sides is also suggestive of a wholly disproportionate response GENEVA: The UN Human Rights Council voted 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 favor 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 Jerusalem. Opening the special session earlier 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 minimize 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 Hamas movement. Israel condemned the “hypocrisy and absurdity” of the UN Human Rights Council, which was put forward by a group of countries including Pakistan, and the United States decried it as an example of a biased focus on Israel by the council. Both lamented that it didn’t mention Gaza’s Hamas rulers, whom Israel blames for the violence. “Israel completely rejects the decision of the Human Rights Council, which proves once again that it is an anti-Israeli... body dominated by hypocrisy and absurdity,” the Israeli foreign ministry said in a statement.