Senior Israeli officials have said their country’s representatives at the United Nations Human Rights Council have been ordered to cut all contact with the council and to ignore calls from the human rights commissioner.
The move comes in response to a vote passed at the 19th session of the UNHRC, to establish an independent international fact-finding mission to look into illegal settlements built by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The council said the mission would "investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem".
The council also requested Israel not to obstruct the probe and to cooperate with the investigation.
However Israel has now cut all working relationships with the UNHRC in response to the mission, which it called a 'superfluous and extravagant body'.
"The secretariat of the human rights council and Navi Pillay sparked this process by establishing an international investigative committee on settlements, and we will thus not work with them anymore and will not appear before the council," one senior official told the Haaretz newspaper.
Israel is also reported to be considering placing sanctions on the Palestinian Authority in response to the vote.
Laura Dupuy Lasserre, the president of the council said Israel’s decision was ‘most regrettable’.
"I have no doubt that it is in the interest of Israel to co-operate with the Human Rights Council on this investigative mission, not least so that it can explain its own policies and actions to the independent commissioners once they are appointed," she said.
There are estimated to be over 500,000 Jews living in illegal settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, built after the occupation in 1967.
