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<h1 class="page__title title balance-text" id="page-title">“Balance”
in UN Gaza report can’t hide massive Israeli war crimes</h1>
<header class="node__header">
<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel"
datatype="">Ali Abunimah</a></span>
<span class="field field-blog"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blog/activism-and-bds-beat"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel"
datatype="">Activism and BDS Beat</a></span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single" property="dc:date"
datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2015-06-22T19:45:18+00:00">22
June 2015<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/balance-un-gaza-report-cant-hide-massive-israeli-war-crimes">https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/balance-un-gaza-report-cant-hide-massive-israeli-war-crimes</a></small></small></b><br>
</span></span> </p>
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<p>There can be no surprise that the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/un-human-rights-council">UN
Human Rights Council’s</a> independent investigation of Israel’s
assault on Gaza last summer found evidence of massive and
systematic war crimes.</p>
<p>Its <a
href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIGazaConflict/Pages/ReportCoIGaza.aspx#report">report</a>,
published Monday in Geneva, says investigators were “able to
gather substantial information pointing to serious violations of
international humanitarian law and international human rights law
by Israel and by Palestinian armed groups.”</p>
<p>“The extent of the devastation and human suffering in Gaza was
unprecedented and will impact generations to come,” the chair of
the investigation commission, Justice Mary McGowan Davis <a
href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=16119&LangID=E">told
media</a>, adding that “there is also ongoing fear in Israel
among communities who come under regular threat.”</p>
<p>Despite the “balanced” language that is now the habitual refuge
of international officials hoping to avoid false accusations of
anti-Israel bias, the evidence shows that the scale and impact of
Israeli violence dwarfs anything allegedly done by Palestinians.</p>
<p>Israel systematically targeted Palestinian residential buildings
and infrastructure without any apparent military justification.
The horror of what Israel did, detailed in the 183-page report,
cannot be adequately summarized here.</p>
<p>In total, 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462
Palestinian civilians, among them 551 children, the report states.
More than 11,000 Palestinians, including 3,540 women and 3,436
children, were injured with almost 10 percent suffering permanent
disabilities.</p>
<p>Six civilians died in Israel and more than 60 Israeli soldiers
died in fighting with the Palestinian resistance.</p>
<p>But a key finding is that the mass destruction and killing
inflicted by Israel, often amounting to war crimes, “may have
constituted military tactics reflective of a broader policy,
approved at least tacitly by decision-makers at the highest levels
of the Government of Israel.”</p>
<p>This finding provides an important basis for Palestinians to
pursue Israeli leaders, not just their uniformed subordinates, and
bring them to justice in international courts.</p>
<p>The report also confirms that Israel remains the occupying power
in Gaza as far as international law is concerned, because it
continues to exercise “effective control” over the territory.
Israel is therefore subject to all the legal obligations of an
occupying power to protect civilians there.</p>
<p>It also found a massive escalation of Israeli violations of
Palestinian human rights in the occupied West Bank including East
Jerusalem in the weeks preceding and during the Gaza assault that
was “overshadowed by the tragic events in Gaza.”</p>
<h2>Israeli obstruction</h2>
<p>The commission was made up of two independent experts: former New
York Supreme Court Justice Mary McGowan Davis, who chaired it, and
Senegal’s Doudou Diène, a former UN special rapporteur on racism.</p>
<p>The previous chair, Canadian international law expert William
Schabas, resigned from the commission in February under relentless
Israeli criticism and pressure.</p>
<p>Israel’s concern about the make up of the committee was not
matched by a willingness to cooperate with its work. Israel
refused to respond to any requests for information and barred the
investigators from traveling to the occupied West Bank and Gaza
Strip or to present-day Israel.</p>
<p>The Egyptian military regime also colluded with Israel by
blocking investigators entering Gaza through the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/rafah">Rafah crossing</a>.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the investigators and their staff conducted hundreds
of interviews with victims and witnesses, received hundreds of
written submissions and obtained large amounts of data from other
UN bodies. They also consulted satellite imagery, independent
military experts, government documents and statements and evidence
gathered by independent organizations.</p>
<h2>Deliberate attacks on civilians</h2>
<p>Israel carried out more than 6,000 airstrikes on Gaza last
summer, the report states, including “targeted attacks on
residential and other buildings.”</p>
<p>As a result of these attacks, 142 Palestinians families “had
three or more members killed in the same incident owing to the
destruction of residential buildings,” for a total of at least 742
deaths, according to UN figures.</p>
<p>The report examines in detail 15 attacks on residential buildings
in which a total of 216 people were killed, including 115 children
and 50 women. Israel refused to provide any information on what
made these buildings alleged military targets.</p>
<h2>Killed while they slept</h2>
<p>In one of the incidents, at 2 am on 10 July, Israel attacked the
house of Mahmoud al-Haj in Khan Younis. All eight members of the
family were killed, including two children and three women. The
bomb completely destroyed the house and damaged surrounding homes
injuring 20 more people, mostly women and children.</p>
<p>In another attack, on the afternoon of 21 July, Israeli forces
fired two missiles at the five-story building of the al-Qassas
family, killing nine people, including six children and three
women, one of them pregnant. Another 10, mostly children and one a
baby, were injured.</p>
<p>The investigators could find no information to suggest “that
there was a military target in the al-Qassas building.”</p>
<p>This was frequently the case. “In many of the cases examined by
the commission, as well as in incidents reported by local and
international organizations,” the report states, “there is little
or no information as to how residential buildings, which are prima
facie civilian objects immune from attack, came to be regarded as
legitimate military objectives.”</p>
<h2>Israeli justification debunked</h2>
<p>The report does find that “indications of possible military
objectives emerged in nine of the 15 cases” of attacks on
residential buildings that it examines.</p>
<p>But it says that “the potential targets of the attack seem to
have been mostly individuals who were or who could have been
present in the building that was struck, indicating that one or
several individuals were the likely target and not the building
itself.”</p>
<p>Here, the report refutes one of the major Israeli justifications
for attacking homes: that someone associated with an armed group
lives in one. However, the report “underlines that the mere fact
of being a member of the political wing of Hamas or any other
organization in Gaza, or working for the authorities … is not
sufficient in and of itself to render a person a legitimate
military target.”</p>
<p>It adds that “under international humanitarian law, a member of
an armed group has to have a continuous combat function to
constitute a legitimate military target.”</p>
<p>Even if the person were a “legitimate military target,” Israel’s
method of attacking homes is disrproportionate, indiscriminate and
illegal.</p>
<p>The investigators also consulted military experts who found that
the types of US-supplied bombs Israel dropped – such as the
GBU-32/MK-82 1,000 lb bomb or the GBU-31/MK-84 2,000 lb bomb –
have such a wide impact that their use amounted to indiscriminate
attacks.</p>
<p>During the attack, Israel often boasted about its use of a
smaller “warning missile” or “knock on the roof” to tell residents
to get out of a building minutes before a much bigger explosion.
But the report concludes “that the ‘roof-knocking’ technique is
not effective” and there were many instances in which civilians
were killed despite such warnings.</p>
<h2>Destruction of Shujaiya</h2>
<p>On 19 and 20 July, Israel carried out a massive artillery
bombardment of the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/shujaiya">Shujaiya</a>
neighborhood of eastern Gaza City, killing at least 55 people,
including 19 children and 14 women.</p>
<p>As The Electronic Intifada <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/how-many-bombs-has-israel-dropped-gaza">reported
last year</a>, the type of weapons used – predominantly heavy
artillery and mortars – means the attack could not but have been
indiscriminate.</p>
<p>Israel also used over 100 one-ton bombs in the attack which
destroyed 670 buildings and damaged another 1,200.</p>
<p>The UN report now confirms that “these methods and means employed
by the [Israeli army] could not, in such a small and densely
populated area, be directed at a specific military target and
could not adequately distinguish between civilians and civilian
objects and military objectives as required by [international
humanitarian law].”</p>
<p>“Therefore,” the report concludes, “there are strong indications
that the IDF’s [Israeli army] Shujaiya operation on 19 and 20 July
was conducted in violation of the prohibition of indiscriminate
attacks and may amount to a war crime.”</p>
<h2>Human shields</h2>
<p>Similarly, the report examines and finds evidence of war crimes
during Israel’s siege and shelling of the village of <a
href="http://electronicintifada/net/tags/khuzaa">Khuzaa</a>
between 20 July and 1 August and its <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/adri-nieuwhof/israel-used-disappearance-soldier-pretext-killing-spree-rights-group">massive
bombardment</a> of the southern city of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/rafah">Rafah</a> after
one of its soldiers was reported captured on 1 August.</p>
<p>Israel also used human shields in Khuzaa, a farming village in
east central Gaza. On 23 July, for instance, 17-year-old Ahmed Abu
Reda was abducted by Israeli soldiers from his family as they
tried to flee the area.</p>
<p>He was kept hostage for five days during which he was
interrogated and, according to his father, forced to undertake
“risky tasks such as opening doors, inspecting rooms, switching
the lights on and off to test whether secret explosives were being
connected to the light switches, open fridges and other devices
that may have detonated explosions.”</p>
<p>It concludes that “there are strong indications that elements of
the IDF operation in Khuzaa may qualify as direct attacks against
civilians or civilian objects and may thus amount to a war crime.”</p>
<p>In Rafah, Israel implemented the “<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/hannibal-directive">Hannibal
Directive</a>,” a procedure which calls for massive fire to
prevent a soldier being captured even if it kills the soldier.</p>
<p>The report cites Israel’s “military culture” resulting from this
and other policies as “a contributing factor for the unleashing of
massive firepower on Rafah, in total disregard for its impact on
the civilian population.”</p>
<p>It also finds that Israeli commanders continued the attack for
hours even when they must have known about the catastrophic death
and injury they were causing to civilians – in itself a potential
war crime.</p>
<h2>Accusations against Palestinians</h2>
<p>Any Israeli claim that the investigation is biased is refuted by
the accusations the report levels against Palestinian resistance
groups.</p>
<p>It says the investigators have “serious concerns with regard to
the inherently indiscriminate nature of most of the projectiles
directed towards Israel by these groups and to the targeting of
Israeli civilians, which violate international humanitarian law
and may amount to a war crime.”</p>
<p>It also condemns the extrajudicial executions by Hamas of two
dozen Palestinians accused of collaborating with the enemy as a
war crime. These executions had already been condemned by
Palestinian and international human rights organizations.</p>
<p>Yet in many of the specific instances examined by the committee,
especially those involving mortar fire at Israeli targets near the
Gaza boundary, the investigators found that Palestinians were
aiming at Israeli military targets that were often deliberately
placed close to civilian communities.</p>
<h2>Military bases near civilians</h2>
<p>The report notes “a number of military objectives are located in
various parts of Israel, in some cases in the immediate vicinity
of built up areas such as the Hatzor airbase, or in the case of
the IDF Headquarters, in the midst of a densely populated area.”</p>
<p>It adds that during the attack on Gaza, “the number of IDF
positions in the south of Israel around Gaza, sometimes close to
civilian communities, was higher than usual.”</p>
<p>“Mortar fire by the Palestinian armed groups appears to have
often been aimed at specific targets and is more precise than the
rockets in the armed groups’ arsenal,” the report states.</p>
<p>On 22 August 2014, 4-year-old Daniel Tregerman, the only Israeli
child fatality in the conflict, was killed by a mortar shell in
his home at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, 2 kilometers from the Gaza boundary.</p>
<p>The report notes that this too was an area of intense military
activity.</p>
<p>“Based on the information available,” the report states, “the
commission cannot exclude that the intended target of the tragic
attack of 22 August on Kibbutz Nahal Oz was the IDF Chief of
Staff.”</p>
<h2>Israeli claims hard to verify</h2>
<p>The report acknowledges that in many cases, Palestinian armed
groups warned Israeli civilians, especially in the areas near
Gaza, and when they fired rockets towards Ben Gurion Airport, of
impending attacks.</p>
<p>The investigators say they asked Israel for “detailed
information” on “where the rockets and mortars fired by
Palestinian armed groups in Gaza actually landed so as to make a
more detailed assessment of the proportion of cases in which they
were directed at densely populated areas in Israel.”</p>
<p>But Israel – which is always eager to tell global media about how
its civilians are the main targets of Palestinian groups –
refused, making it “difficult for the commission to determine the
extent to which attacks [were] directed at the civilian population
in Israel.”</p>
<h2>Legitimate military targets</h2>
<p>As for tunnels dug from Gaza into present-day Israel, the report
is blunt: “during the period under examination, the tunnels were
only used to conduct attacks directed at IDF positions in Israel
in the vicinity of the Green Line, which are legitimate military
targets.”</p>
<p>The report concedes, however, that “in the vast majority of
individual rocket and mortar attacks, the commission does not have
information on the intended targets, but notes that Palestinian
armed groups announced that they intended to attack population
centers in Israel and declared responsibility for launches
directed at different places in Israel.”</p>
<p>It also notes that the “majority of projectiles fired by
Palestinian armed groups consisted of rockets that at best were
equipped with only rudimentary guidance systems and in the vast
majority of cases had none at all.”</p>
<p>It acknowledges that the “limitations of the military arsenals of
Palestinian armed groups was advanced as a reason for their
failure to attack precisely military targets.”</p>
<p>“Security experts have noted that while the al-Qassam Brigades
[the military wing of Hamas] may have targeted civilians in the
past as part of its military strategy, in 2014 its declared
official policy was ‘to focus on military or semi-military targets
and to avoid other targets, especially civilians,’” the report
observes.</p>
<p>But it notes that under the relevant international law, the
“military capacity of the parties to a conflict is irrelevant to
their obligation to respect the prohibition against indiscriminate
attacks.”</p>
<p>While this may be the case, what it indicates is that if
Palestinians exercising a legitimate right to resistance and
self-defense were allowed access to more precise weapons, most of
the activities designated as possible war crimes in the report
would probably not have occurred.</p>
<p>This is not true, however, in the case of Israel, which boasts
about its very precise weapons and yet inflicted massive amounts
of death, injury and destruction on civilians as a result of its
policy of targeting them.</p>
<p>Instead, Palestinian resistance groups are designated as
“terrorists” and barred from obtaining more accurate weapons,
while the United States, European Union and other governments
continue to supply Israel’s massive arsenal.</p>
<p>The report, if anything, displays a distinct anti-Palestinian
bias, using the word “resistance” only between quotation marks as
if the right to resist belligerent military occupation is not a
well-recognized right in international law.</p>
<h2>Analysis</h2>
<p>The report looks at the events in Palestine through the strict
lens of international humanitarian and human rights law. In doing
so it finds evidence that both Palestinians and Israelis committed
war crimes and other violations.</p>
<p>But the crimes allegedly committed by Israel are massive compared
to anything allegedly done by Palestinians.</p>
<p>There can also be no moral equivalence between the legitimate
self-defense and resistance of a people under occupation and the
aggression of an occupier whose aim is to subject millions of
people to its unopposed military tyranny.</p>
<p>It is also apparent that most, though not all, of the
transgressions alleged against Palestinians are an artifact of the
inferior and unguided weapons, often locally made in Gaza, that
are available to resistance groups.</p>
<p>But the approach of the so-called “international community” has
been to deny Palestinians the means to resist against Israeli
occupation forces and then to condemn them for using what they
have.</p>
<p>Despite this, the fact remains that while Israel mostly killed
civilians, Palestinians mostly killed Israeli soldiers. Indeed, 65
percent of those killed by Israel were civilians, while 90 percent
of those killed by Palestinians were <em>armed combatant soldiers</em>.</p>
<p>Nothing is more legitimate than Palestinian resistance and
nothing is more illegitimate than Israeli occupation. And yet it
is to Israel that weapons of massive destruction continue to flow,
often from the countries that preach loudest about human rights
and international law.</p>
<h2>Means of resistance</h2>
<p>It is clear that many governments and international organizations
tacitly reject the Palestinian right to resist militarily even if
they do not say so openly. Many supporters of Palestinian rights
and many Palestinians prefer nonviolence, believing that in the
long run it will make a just peace more feasible.</p>
<p>If that is the case, then everyone must be proactive in offering
support for nonviolent alternatives that can help redress the
balance of power between a tenacious belligerent occupier and its
victims.</p>
<p>Boycott, divestment and sanctions, for instance, must be
recognized and promoted by the so-called international community
as a legitimate means of resistance supplementing other forms of
legitimate resistance to colonial occupation.</p>
<p>As for Israel, its strategy with this investigation as in others,
was to try to obstruct it and then to whine that it is unfair and
biased. If Israel is so certain that its actions were legal and
correct, it should have nothing to hide.</p>
<p>Given the consequences if the report’s call for accountability
were to be implemented, it is no surprise that the government of
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its staunch ally, the US
administration of President Barack Obama, have attacked and
delegitimized the UN investigation from the very start.</p>
<p>It remains to be seen if others will have the courage to demand
accountability and ensure this report is not buried like the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/goldstone-report">Goldstone
report</a> into Israel’s 2008-2009 massacre in Gaza.</p>
<p>Without such accountability, another Israeli massacre in Gaza is
only a matter of time.</p>
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