The United Nations rights chief has voiced alarm at the overt “genocidal rhetoric” by Israeli officials about Gaza and called for decisive international action to “end the carnage”, according to AFP.

He said the occupied Palestinian territory was already “a graveyard”.

In his opening address to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s 60th session, Volker Turk slammed “Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza [and] its infliction of indescribable suffering and wholesale destruction”.

“Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza; its infliction of indescribable suffering and wholesale destruction; its hindering of sufficient lifesaving aid and the ensuing starvation of civilians; its killing of journalists, UN staff and NGO workers and its commission of war crime upon war crime, are shocking the conscience of the world,” he said.

“I am horrified by the open use of genocidal rhetoric and the disgraceful dehumanisation of Palestinians by senior Israeli officials.”