Israel Palestine: Call for Accountability for the massacre of 1900
Civilians - August 7, 2014
http://israel-palestine-dialogue.blogspot.com/2014/08/israel-palestine-call-for.html
Published at the Arab News (August 7, 2014) - http://thearabdailynews.com/2014/08/07/holding-obama-netanyahu-mashaal-accountable-massacres/
Published at the Arab News (August 7, 2014) - http://thearabdailynews.com/2014/08/07/holding-obama-netanyahu-mashaal-accountable-massacres/
Washington Petition (August 7, 2014)
http://wh.gov/luT9U
http://wh.gov/luT9U
Mike Ghouse
# # #
Israel Braces for War Crimes Inquiries on Gaza
JERUSALEM
— The fighting is barely over in the latest Gaza war, with a five-day
cease-fire taking hold on Thursday, but attention has already shifted to
the legal battlefield as Israel gears up to defend itself against
international allegations of possible war crimes in the monthlong
conflict.
Israel
has excoriated the United Nations Human Rights Council over the
appointment of Prof. William Schabas, a Canadian expert in international
law, to head the council’s commission of inquiry for Israel’s military
operations in the Gaza Strip.
The
broader struggle will be over what some experts describe as Israel’s
“creative” interpretation of international law for dealing with
asymmetric warfare in an urban environment. More than 1,900 Palestinians
were killed in the recent fighting, a majority of them believed to be
civilians, while on the Israeli side 64 soldiers and three civilians
were killed.
Israeli leaders view the Human Rights Council as hopelessly biased
against Israel and say statements made in the past by Professor Schabas
rule him out as a fair adjudicator. In one prime example, Professor
Schabas was filmed in New York almost two years ago saying Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was his “favorite” to be in the dock at the
International Criminal Court.
“The
report of this committee has already been written,” Mr. Netanyahu said
this week. “They have nothing to look for here. They should visit
Damascus, Baghdad and Tripoli.”
Mr.
Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Hamas of a “double war crime” for
targeting Israeli civilians with its rockets and, he says, using Gaza’s
civilians as a human shield for its activities.
Yuval
Steinitz, Israel’s minister for strategic affairs, said that
paradoxically, the only way Professor Schabas could prove he was worthy
of the job would be by resigning from it.
Responding
to the accusations by telephone from London, Professor Schabas said
Thursday: “Everybody in the world has opinions about Israel and
Palestine. I certainly do.”
He added: “I was recruited for my expertise. I leave my own personal views at the door, as a judge does.”
Rejecting
assertions that he is “anti-Israeli,” he said he had lectured in Israel
often and was on the board of the Israel Law Review. “I don’t think
everyone in Israel agrees,” he said. “I would fit in well there.”
A
similar Human Rights Council inquiry into the 2008-9 war in Gaza led to
the Goldstone Report. Named for Richard Goldstone, the South African
jurist who led that inquiry, the report said it found evidence of
potential war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas. It accused
Israel of intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza as a matter of
policy, a blow that Mr. Netanyahu once described as a strategic
challenge.
Mr. Goldstone later retracted that central accusation, writing in The Washington Post,
after Israeli investigators presented counterevidence, “If I had known
then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different
document.” Other members of the Goldstone panel stood by the report.
In
Israel’s latest aerial and ground campaign, several episodes already
stand out as likely focuses of international attention, including
several deadly Israeli strikes at or near United Nations schools in Gaza
where thousands of civilians were taking refuge, actions that the
secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, has denounced as
“outrageous, unacceptable and unjustifiable.”
Critics
have also pointed to the Israeli military’s policy of bombing family
homes it said were being used by Hamas operatives or other groups as
“command and control centers” or for weapons storage, causing heavy
casualties among civilians, including many minors and women, despite a
system of issuing prior warnings. B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights
organization, asserted in a recent report
that the practice violated the international legal principles of
distinction and proportionality, calling into question the clear
military nature of the targets and whether the military gains were
significant enough to justify the deaths of civilians.
And
questions have been raised about a particularly aggressive and deadly
Israeli assault on the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah on Aug. 1 as
Israeli forces pursued a Hamas squad they believed had captured a
soldier. Prof. Emanuel Gross, an Israeli expert in military law and a
former military judge, said in a recent interview that the firepower
used in Rafah to try to return one soldier did not seem justified,
morally or legally, and appeared to be “disproportionate.” (The soldier
was later declared killed in action.)
In
a move that some Israelis hope will take the wind out of the Human
Rights Council inquiry and other potential ones by outside groups,
Israel’s attorney general and the military advocate general are setting
up an independent mechanism for investigating the events in Gaza, and
the state comptroller also plans an inquiry.
But
the Israeli military is not waiting. Lt. Col. Eran Shamir-Borer, head
of the strategic affairs branch in the international law department at
the Military Advocate General’s Corps, said in an interview that a
recently established military committee of fact-finding teams,
independent of the chain of command and made up largely of reservists,
is already investigating certain cases and could have some preliminary
findings as early as Friday.
Speaking
at military headquarters in Tel Aviv, Colonel Shamir-Borer said that
since Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, the army’s legal counselors have
become more involved in operational activity before and during military
campaigns, as well as in the aftermath, training commanders, reviewing
planned targets and deploying to the Gaza border to work with commanders
at the division level during the recent conflict.
“We know the law very well,” Colonel Shamir-Borer said, “but it is always more complex than in the textbooks.”
“The modus operandi of our enemy,” he said, referring to Hamas, “is by definition defying the laws of armed conflict.”
Colonel
Shamir-Borer said that the planned bombing of homes was reviewed house
by house, based on intelligence and other considerations, and guidelines
were set for some of the attacks, for example, determining that they
could be carried out only at night, or with a drone to check that the
residents had evacuated.
Individual
cases where many family members were nevertheless killed, such as a
July 13 airstrike on a home that killed 18 members of the Batsh family
and severely wounded Tayseer al-Batsh, the Hamas police chief in Gaza,
are now being examined. In each case the teams will decide if a criminal
investigation is warranted. At this stage, the policy of targeting
houses is not under review.
Colonel
Shamir-Borer said his department had invited nongovernment
organizations to submit complaints and had also approached them.
“You know the international community is going to raise allegations,” he said. “You need answers.”
Graphic
In Gaza, a Pattern of Conflict
Similarities and differences in the last three major conflicts between Israel and Hamas.
But
the Israeli military is not waiting. Lt. Col. Eran Shamir-Borer, head
of the strategic affairs branch in the international law department at
the Military Advocate General’s Corps, said in an interview that a
recently established military committee of fact-finding teams,
independent of the chain of command and made up largely of reservists,
is already investigating certain cases and could have some preliminary
findings as early as Friday.
Speaking
at military headquarters in Tel Aviv, Colonel Shamir-Borer said that
since Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, the army’s legal counselors have
become more involved in operational activity before and during military
campaigns, as well as in the aftermath, training commanders, reviewing
planned targets and deploying to the Gaza border to work with commanders
at the division level during the recent conflict.
“We know the law very well,” Colonel Shamir-Borer said, “but it is always more complex than in the textbooks.”
“The modus operandi of our enemy,” he said, referring to Hamas, “is by definition defying the laws of armed conflict.”
Colonel
Shamir-Borer said that the planned bombing of homes was reviewed house
by house, based on intelligence and other considerations, and guidelines
were set for some of the attacks, for example, determining that they
could be carried out only at night, or with a drone to check that the
residents had evacuated.
Individual
cases where many family members were nevertheless killed, such as a
July 13 airstrike on a home that killed 18 members of the Batsh family
and severely wounded Tayseer al-Batsh, the Hamas police chief in Gaza,
are now being examined. In each case the teams will decide if a criminal
investigation is warranted. At this stage, the policy of targeting
houses is not under review.
Colonel
Shamir-Borer said his department had invited nongovernment
organizations to submit complaints and had also approached them.
“You know the international community is going to raise allegations,” he said. “You need answers.”
No comments:
Post a Comment