What was there to investigate?
It was a war of self-defense, one imposed on the Israeli nation by the enemy, Hamas.
So, and from the outset, they refused to cooperate.
As a result, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict was barred from entering Israel, and prohibited from entering Gaza through the state of Israel. It had to enter Gaza through Egypt.
Israel witnesses were compelled to fly to Geneva in order to testify before the investigating committee…
According to a report issued yesterday by the mission however, the assault on Gaza that began on December 22nd, 2008, and lasted twenty-two days amounted to a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.
The investigation, far from comprehensive, examined 36 incidents it considered representative of the way the conflict was waged by the IDF.
Of particular interest was the death of 22 members of the Samouni family. Instructed by the IDF to find refuge in a house in Zeitoun, east of Gaza City, the building was then shelled by Israeli forces.
In addition, the mission identified at least seven instances in which Palestinian civilians waving white flags were shot as they were leaving their homes.
Also, the report described an attack on the Gaza City al-Quds hospital as direct and intentional.
The Israelis regularly accused Hamas of hiding militants and weapons in mosques. As such, it targeted the Maqadmah mosque one evening, and killed fifteen people.
Instead of bombing the building at night, when no one would have been present, the IDF chose to do so during evening prayers, attended by some 300 worshippers!
The fact that no secondary explosions occurred suggests that the mosque was not, in fact, a weapons cache.
The report, furthermore, denounces the attack on the principle warehouse of the United Nations Relief Works Agency, which was then harboring some 700 refugees, and contained a major fuel depot. The building was struck by up to ten shells, some of which contained white phosphorus, and whose use is illegal in urban, populated settings. The report characterized Israel’s use of this weapon as systematically reckless.
The mission also examined the current status of Gaza, and described the blockade currently imposed (which prohibits the entry of all but humanitarian goods such as food and medicine) as collective punishment, a violation of the Geneva Convention. It concluded that the series of acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of subsistence, employment, housing ... could lead a competent court to find the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, has been committed.
What was Israel’s reaction to the report?
Considering it had done its utmost to prevent the mission from expeditiously completing its work, it was predictable.
The Israelis accused the mission and its president, Richard Goldstone, a respected South African judge who played a key role in investigating political violence in his homeland in the early 1990s and was chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and who happens to be Jewish, of bias.
Israel considers that the UN Human Rights Council, which commissioned the report, lacks the necessary credibility to undertake such an investigation.
An official Israeli spokesman, Mark Regev declared: it (the report) was born in sin. Countries with atrocious human rights records sit there and criticize Israel. It's not just Israel that criticized the Human Rights Council. Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon have criticized its obsession with Israel.
Yet, the report also condemns Hamas’ conduct during the conflict. It characterizes the launching of rockets on Israeli neighborhoods as a war crime. Since 2001, Hamas and other Islamic militants have fired over 8000 rockets on Israel. During the Gaza war, four Israeli were killed (including three civilians) by the missile attacks.
Mr. Goldstone, for his part, defended the commission’s work and emphasized that there should be no impunity for international crimes that are committed. It's very important that justice should be done.
Furthermore, he added, it is grossly wrong to label a mission or to label a report critical of Israel as being anti-Israel. That, however, is precisely what is happening…
Just how many Gazans were killed during the assault?
The various parties cannot even agree on that…
According to the Israeli government, 1166 Palestinians were killed, 89 of which were under the age of 16. The majority, 60%, were Hamas militants. Israel considers anyone remotely connected to Hamas or the Hamas government as a legitimate target.
The authorities did not reveal their sources, but it must be said that they compiled their figures without having access to the survivors, or the victims’ families on the ground in Gaza.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (In the Image) reached different conclusions. The organization could rely on two members in Gaza, even though the IDF prevented all outsiders from penetrating into the strip.
According to its research, 1387 Gazans were killed, 320 of which were under 18.
Only 19 of the latter were found by the organization to have been combatants.
B’Tselem found that 773 civilians (55%) were among the dead. The 248 policemen killed were classified as neither civilians nor combatants.
The organization has sent evidence concerning the most egregious cases directly to the IDF prosecutor. It concluded that the extremely heavy civilian casualties and the massive damage to civilian property require serious introspection on the part of Israeli society.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights found that 1419 Gazans were killed, 252 of which were combatants. Children accounted for 318 of these casualties.
Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician, and an outspoken critic of Israel, who was present during the conflict claimed that among the patients killed and injured at Shifa Hospital, Gaza's largest medical facility, 80 to 90 percent we saw were civilians.
Attacks on NGOs and the UN on the part of the Israeli government have intensified of late, all the more so as the Netanyahu government was expecting the IDF to be taken to task by the Goldstone commission.
The authorities and an Israeli NGO, NGO Monitor, have repeatedly accused organizations such as B’Tselem, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of
systematic anti-Israeli bias in their work.
The fact that some pro-Israeli bloggers discovered that a prominent HRW researcher, Marc Garlasco, collected WWII German military memorabilia further diminished that organization’s credibility in the eyes of many Israelis…
And yet, the facts are there, they speak for themselves, and the Garlasco diversion notwithstanding , they must be addressed.
The report will be officially presented to the Human Rights Council on September 29th.
It will then decide whether or not to send it to the Security Council if it considers further action is warranted.
The International Criminal Court will have no role to play, as it is not recognized by Israel…
Yet, justice must not forever be barred from the land of Palestine…
That gross acts of injustice were committed by the IDF in its onslaught on Gaza is obvious to any one with even a pedestrian interest in the issue.
That some attacks may qualify as war crimes is equally obvious….
That the Israelis, who like to remind the rest of the world that their nation is the only democracy in the region and that they share our western values, have not the slightest inclination to investigate these blatant violations of the laws of war, and of morality itself, is deeply disappointing…
It behooves us in Europe and the United States to do all we can to make them reconsider so, that, at last, justice may finally visit that hapless land called Gaza…
It was a war of self-defense, one imposed on the Israeli nation by the enemy, Hamas.
So, and from the outset, they refused to cooperate.
As a result, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict was barred from entering Israel, and prohibited from entering Gaza through the state of Israel. It had to enter Gaza through Egypt.
Israel witnesses were compelled to fly to Geneva in order to testify before the investigating committee…
According to a report issued yesterday by the mission however, the assault on Gaza that began on December 22nd, 2008, and lasted twenty-two days amounted to a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.
The investigation, far from comprehensive, examined 36 incidents it considered representative of the way the conflict was waged by the IDF.
Of particular interest was the death of 22 members of the Samouni family. Instructed by the IDF to find refuge in a house in Zeitoun, east of Gaza City, the building was then shelled by Israeli forces.
In addition, the mission identified at least seven instances in which Palestinian civilians waving white flags were shot as they were leaving their homes.
Also, the report described an attack on the Gaza City al-Quds hospital as direct and intentional.
The Israelis regularly accused Hamas of hiding militants and weapons in mosques. As such, it targeted the Maqadmah mosque one evening, and killed fifteen people.
Instead of bombing the building at night, when no one would have been present, the IDF chose to do so during evening prayers, attended by some 300 worshippers!
The fact that no secondary explosions occurred suggests that the mosque was not, in fact, a weapons cache.
The report, furthermore, denounces the attack on the principle warehouse of the United Nations Relief Works Agency, which was then harboring some 700 refugees, and contained a major fuel depot. The building was struck by up to ten shells, some of which contained white phosphorus, and whose use is illegal in urban, populated settings. The report characterized Israel’s use of this weapon as systematically reckless.
The mission also examined the current status of Gaza, and described the blockade currently imposed (which prohibits the entry of all but humanitarian goods such as food and medicine) as collective punishment, a violation of the Geneva Convention. It concluded that the series of acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of subsistence, employment, housing ... could lead a competent court to find the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, has been committed.
What was Israel’s reaction to the report?
Considering it had done its utmost to prevent the mission from expeditiously completing its work, it was predictable.
The Israelis accused the mission and its president, Richard Goldstone, a respected South African judge who played a key role in investigating political violence in his homeland in the early 1990s and was chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and who happens to be Jewish, of bias.
Israel considers that the UN Human Rights Council, which commissioned the report, lacks the necessary credibility to undertake such an investigation.
An official Israeli spokesman, Mark Regev declared: it (the report) was born in sin. Countries with atrocious human rights records sit there and criticize Israel. It's not just Israel that criticized the Human Rights Council. Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon have criticized its obsession with Israel.
Yet, the report also condemns Hamas’ conduct during the conflict. It characterizes the launching of rockets on Israeli neighborhoods as a war crime. Since 2001, Hamas and other Islamic militants have fired over 8000 rockets on Israel. During the Gaza war, four Israeli were killed (including three civilians) by the missile attacks.
Mr. Goldstone, for his part, defended the commission’s work and emphasized that there should be no impunity for international crimes that are committed. It's very important that justice should be done.
Furthermore, he added, it is grossly wrong to label a mission or to label a report critical of Israel as being anti-Israel. That, however, is precisely what is happening…
Just how many Gazans were killed during the assault?
The various parties cannot even agree on that…
According to the Israeli government, 1166 Palestinians were killed, 89 of which were under the age of 16. The majority, 60%, were Hamas militants. Israel considers anyone remotely connected to Hamas or the Hamas government as a legitimate target.
The authorities did not reveal their sources, but it must be said that they compiled their figures without having access to the survivors, or the victims’ families on the ground in Gaza.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (In the Image) reached different conclusions. The organization could rely on two members in Gaza, even though the IDF prevented all outsiders from penetrating into the strip.
According to its research, 1387 Gazans were killed, 320 of which were under 18.
Only 19 of the latter were found by the organization to have been combatants.
B’Tselem found that 773 civilians (55%) were among the dead. The 248 policemen killed were classified as neither civilians nor combatants.
The organization has sent evidence concerning the most egregious cases directly to the IDF prosecutor. It concluded that the extremely heavy civilian casualties and the massive damage to civilian property require serious introspection on the part of Israeli society.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights found that 1419 Gazans were killed, 252 of which were combatants. Children accounted for 318 of these casualties.
Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician, and an outspoken critic of Israel, who was present during the conflict claimed that among the patients killed and injured at Shifa Hospital, Gaza's largest medical facility, 80 to 90 percent we saw were civilians.
Attacks on NGOs and the UN on the part of the Israeli government have intensified of late, all the more so as the Netanyahu government was expecting the IDF to be taken to task by the Goldstone commission.
The authorities and an Israeli NGO, NGO Monitor, have repeatedly accused organizations such as B’Tselem, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of
systematic anti-Israeli bias in their work.
The fact that some pro-Israeli bloggers discovered that a prominent HRW researcher, Marc Garlasco, collected WWII German military memorabilia further diminished that organization’s credibility in the eyes of many Israelis…
And yet, the facts are there, they speak for themselves, and the Garlasco diversion notwithstanding , they must be addressed.
The report will be officially presented to the Human Rights Council on September 29th.
It will then decide whether or not to send it to the Security Council if it considers further action is warranted.
The International Criminal Court will have no role to play, as it is not recognized by Israel…
Yet, justice must not forever be barred from the land of Palestine…
That gross acts of injustice were committed by the IDF in its onslaught on Gaza is obvious to any one with even a pedestrian interest in the issue.
That some attacks may qualify as war crimes is equally obvious….
That the Israelis, who like to remind the rest of the world that their nation is the only democracy in the region and that they share our western values, have not the slightest inclination to investigate these blatant violations of the laws of war, and of morality itself, is deeply disappointing…
It behooves us in Europe and the United States to do all we can to make them reconsider so, that, at last, justice may finally visit that hapless land called Gaza…
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