UN rights chief: Israel minister inciting violence with Huwara statement

The U.N. human rights chief on Friday criticised Israel's hard-line finance minister for remarks in which he called for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be erased, describing the comments as "an unfathomable statement of incitement to violence and hostility".

Volker Turk was addressing the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council, where he formally presented a report on the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

He was referring to remarks by Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the head of a pro-settler party in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's nationalist-religious coalition, on Wednesday amid a spate of deadly Palestinian attacks and Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank.