This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch: Israel Is Targeting CIVILIANS In Gaza
Preface - related news from this week:
Update: Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has asked the U.S. for help in avoiding war crime charges.
Amnesty International just released a report stating:
An immediate investigation is needed into mounting evidence that the Israel Defense Forces launched apparently deliberate attacks against hospitals and health professionals in Gaza, which have left six medics dead, said Amnesty International as it released disturbing testimonies from doctors, nurses, and ambulance personnel working in the area.
***
“Even more alarming is the mounting evidence that the Israeli army has targeted health facilities or professionals. Such attacks are absolutely prohibited by international law and would amount to war crimes. They only add to the already compelling argument that the situation should be referred to the International Criminal Court.”
Human Rights Watch released a report this week headlined, “Gaza: Israeli Soldiers Shoot and Kill Fleeing Civilians“, stating:
Israeli forces in the southern Gaza town of Khuza’a fired on and killed civilians in apparent violation of the laws of war in several incidents between July 23 and 25, 2014. Deliberate attacks on civilians who are not participating in the fighting are war crimes.
***
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported that on July 25, a Red Crescent volunteer [the equivalent of the Red Cross] was mortally wounded in an Israeli attack in Khuza’a, and other volunteers who tried to rescue him were fired on. Under the laws of war, medical workers are civilians who may not be targeted for attack.
***
Human Rights Watch investigated several incidents between July 23 and 25 when, local residents said, Israeli forces opened fire on civilians trying to flee Khuza’a, but no Palestinian fighters were present at the time and no firefights were taking place.
***
“The horrors of war are bad enough for civilians even when all sides abide by the law,” [Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa director] said. “But it’s abhorrent that Israeli forces are making matters even worse by so blatantly violating the laws of war designed to spare civilians.”
Last month, Human Rights Watch documented that the types of weapons used by the Israeli military prove that the killing of civilians was intentional.
Human Rights Watch executive director (and former federal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York) Kenneth Roth – said:
It was the subject of fairly relentless bombardment. Finally, after a couple of days, on July 23rd through July 25th, families slowly tried to leave Khuza’a for their larger city of Khan Younis nearby, hoping to find refuge there. And as you would do in a situation like this, they raised white flags. They did everything they could to make clear that they were not militants. But on several different occasions, Israeli forces shot at them and actually killed some among the people who were fleeing.
***
No matter how many times the Israeli military spokesmen scream, “Human shields! Human shields!” most of the people being killed in Gaza are being killed because Israel is paying insufficient care to saving civilian lives. There’s been case after case in which Israel has used the wrong weaponry or has shot at people with many civilians around. And these, in our view, are war crimes.
***
The only real recourse that we see is to the International Criminal Court.
***
[The Israeli soldiers] use, for example—The New York Times did an interesting study yesterday—heavy artillery, 155-millimeter artillery, which is utterly inappropriate in a densely populated area, because this kind of artillery is considered accurate if it lands anyplace within a 50-meter radius. You know, you can imagine there are a lot of civilians in that area. It has a fragmentation and blast effect of 300 meters. And nonetheless, Israel lets off barrages of these heavy artilleries. The New York Times documented that yesterday. Or they’ll bring in their air force and simply bomb, even though there are many, many civilians in these areas.
***
We’ve gone through this in the prior Gaza efforts. We went through it with the Hezbollah war. I actually, you know, after the Hezbollah war, went and briefed the senior Israeli lawyer for the military, describing many of these same problems, the fact that you can’t just issue a warning and assume that everybody left, in that case, is Hezbollah. So, you know, they are completely on notice. We’ve accused them of this in the past. They just keep repeating it. And it seems to be almost by design to try to make the people of Gaza pay a price because Hamas is ruling over them…. I mean, that’s a war crime logic, and Israel is oftentimes acting according to the same logic in Gaza.
The UN stated last month that Israeli attacks on UN shelters housing civilians are intentional.
An Israeli soldier explicitly confirmed:
Palestinian civilians killed during the Shuja’iyya massacre of July 20 were deliberately targeted ….
The unofficial reason was to enable the soldiers to take out their frustrations and pain at losing their fellow soldiers on the Palestinian refugees in the neighborhood. Under the pretext of the so-called ‘security threat,’ soldiers were directed to carry out a pre-planned attack of revenge on Palestinian civilians.”
The United Nations reported in 2009 that Israel was intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza.
Wikipedia summarizes the findings of the 2009 UN report:
The report disputes Israel’s claim that the Gaza war would have been conducted as a response to rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, saying that at least in part the war was targeted against the “people of Gaza as a whole”. Intimidation against the population was seen as an aim of the war.[70] The report also says that Israel’s military assault on Gaza was designed to “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”.[49]
The report focused on 36 cases that it said constituted a representative sample. In 11 of these episodes, it said the Israeli military carried out direct attacks against civilians, including some in which civilians were shot “while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags”.[49] Talking to Bill Moyers Journal, Goldstone said that the committee chose 36 incidents that represented the highest death toll, where there seemed to be little or no military justification for what happened.[71] According to the report, another alleged war crime committed by IDF include “wanton” destruction of food production, water and sewerage facilities; the report also asserts that some attacks, which were supposedly aimed to kill small number of combatants amidst significant numbers of civilians, were disproportionate.[49]
The report concluded that Israel violated the Fourth Geneva Convention by targeting civilians, which it labeled “a grave breach”.[72] It also claimed that the violations were “systematic and deliberate“, which placed the blame in the first place on those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations.[73]
And a prominent Jewish leader says that Israel intentionally massacred Palestinian civilians in 1948 in order to terrorize the population … and is still doing the same thing today.
Postscript: There is plenty of circumstantial evidence for targeting of civilians as well, in the form of calls for genocide and mass murder against Palestinians.
For example, the Times of Israel recently published a piece calling for genocide on the Palestinians.
And Andrew Sullivan notes:
What is one to make of the fact that the deputy speaker of the Knesset has called for ethnic cleansing in Gaza?
He’s not an obscure blogger for the Times of Israel. He is a luminary of the Likud – a man who got 23 percent of the vote in a contest for the Likud Party leadership. He was appointed to his current high position by Benjamin Netanyahu.
***
His strategic goal is to “turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians.” (Modern Jaffa, of course, was built on the ethnic cleansing of most of its Palestinian inhabitants in 1948.)
***
In Israel, this theme is intensifying:
The statements of Ovadia Yosef, whose recent passing was met with flattering memorials both in Israel and the US, are legendary. The former Chief Rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of many Middle Eastern Jews, said, among other things, that Palestinians “should perish from the world” and that “it is forbidden to be merciful to them”; of non-Jews in general, he declared that “Goyim were born only to serve us.” Despite comments like these, his funeral last October was the largest in the country’s history, with 800,000 Israelis attending. In the past month, Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva, the largest Jewish religious youth group in the world, called for the mass-murder of Palestinians and for their foreskins to be scalped and brought back as trophies, alluding to an episode in the Book of Samuel; and a Jerusalem city councillor, in charge of security, encouraged a crowd to mimic the Biblical character of Phineas (Pinchas in Hebrew), who murdered a fellow Israelite and his Midianite lover for the “crime” of miscegenation…
One local chief rabbi ruled that bombing Palestinian civilians is permissible, while another, considered a “liberal” by Israeli standards, declared the assault on Gaza to be a holy war mandated by the Torah–one which must be merciless.
Today, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, Giora Eiland, called for treating all Gazans, including women, as enemy combatants:
We are seeing now that despite the IDF’s impressive fighting, despite the absolute military supremacy, we are in a sort of “strategic tie.” What would have been the right thing to do? We should have declared war against the state of Gaza (rather than against the Hamas organization), and in a war as in a war.
***
And we are not merely talking about a hypothetical situation. The grotesque death toll from Gaza is a distillation of this mindset – revealing at best a chilling contempt for Arab life and at worst, with the shelling of schools and shelters, a policy of indiscriminate hatred and revenge. Yes, killing women and children in shelters is about as low as you can get in wartime. As the State Department, in a rare moment of public candor, noted, it is appalling and disgraceful.
»
- advertisements -
the IDF fanatics have a more than 90% killrate with kids & children are their #1 target.
No. The Hamas weapons systems are their #1 target. Hamas gets the blame for placing those weapons systems amongst the people they were elected to protect.
Must have hit a nerve..
"Hamas shooting rockets into Israel is WRONG. It not only might kill someone - and is therefore wrong - but it is also stupid and counter-productive."
You may have added a bit of that side of the story when writing a piece about "Targeting CIVILIANS".
I get it, a lot of Jews are bad folk! Same for Germans, Americans, and every other race that's walked on two legs. But if we give antisemitism a pass who's to say Americans will not suffer the same fate in the near future when we're all painted with the sins of our own ignorant oligarchs?
since hasbara has informed me that israel=all jews, i think all of them need to poked with hot lead. even their god says murder is evil and capital punishment is an accepted punishment for evil.
this has been an equal time announcement to balance the continuous calls for muslim and arabic genocide by the hasbara zionuts.
... the continuous calls for muslim and arabic genocide by the hasbara zionuts.
I think folks can see for themselves that such calls have not been made.
There have been comments made about the right of a country to decide to be the conqueror rather than the conquered. That decision leads to certain defensive choices. Choices that are unfortunate for the population amongst whom the enemy has chosen to place its weapons systems.
Supporting the choice of a nation to defend itself in the face of such choices by the enemy does not equal a call for genocide.
But you knew all of this already, before you made your propaganda comment, didn't you.
Such calls have been made at least 100x per day.
For those who think all Muslims are terrorists, why has the U.S. been backing the tyrannical Saudi Arabian regime for decades?
Why did we back Al Qaeda in Libya and Syria?
Why have we backed Islamic terrorists inside Iran?
A German's View on Islam - worth reading. This is one of the best explanations of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read. His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read. The author of this email is Dr. Emanuel Tanya, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist. A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. 'Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.' We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is a religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers. The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China 's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And who can forget Rwanda , which collapsed into butchery? Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'? History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany , they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. Now Islamic prayers have been introduced in Toronto and other public schools in Ontario , and, yes, in Ottawa , too, while the Lord's Prayer was removed (due to being so offensive?). The Islamic way may be peaceful for the time being in our country until the fanatics move in. In Australia , and indeed in many countries around the world, many of the most commonly consumed food items have the halal emblem on them. Just look at the back of some of the most popular chocolate bars, and at other food items in your local supermarket. Food on aircraft have the halal emblem just to appease the privileged minority who are now rapidly expanding within the nation's shores. In the U.K, the Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now dozens of "no-go" zones within major cities across the country that the police force dare not intrude upon. Sharia law prevails there, because the Muslim community in those areas refuse to acknowledge British law. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts - the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
the fanatics are the pnac/clean break advocates running the usa and israel. they are a tiny group of people who have already managed to trash the constitution, killed millions of innocent people and have begun to incarcerate and kill strident nonbelievers.
Very well said. If only 1% of Muslims were terrorists .... do the math. Thats a lot of terrorists. Keep in mind though, they are NOT fanatics or radicals, they are the Muslims that are actually practicing their religion. The silent ones are not.
"A German's view of Islam"? Didn't read the rest, the guy's not German. I don't think he ever set foot in Germany. (This from Wikipedia).
Tanay was born in Vilna but the family soon moved to Miechow, a small community just south of Kraków.[1] His mother, Betty Tenenwurzel, was both a physician and dentist and his father, Bunim Tenenwurzel, was a dentist. He survived by being hidden in the Catholic monastery of Mogila in Kraków, Poland.[2]
In 1943 Tanay escaped from occupied Poland with his mother and sister to Slovakia and then Hungary. They were liberated in January 1945 in Budapest.[3] He immigrated to the United States after World War II. He did his psychiatric residency at Elgin State Hospital in Elgin, Illinois.
I agree with you there.
Pay them market price for their oil and stay out of their tribal and internecine wars.
Those orgs are as credible as the State Department.
And more credible then Jay Carney. Now there was a peice of work.
My personal belief is that Hamas intentionally fires rockets from where civilians are.
Sheep to the slaughter, on their way to 72 virgins or whatever reward Women and Innocent Children get.
Muslims state quite clearly they want to destroy Israel and kill anyone who will not bow to Allah. What do we not get about this?
They are clear in their beliefs. As insane as they may be, they are no more insane than establishing a Jewish State in the Middle East.
I see a multitude of pawns on both sides, the big question is, pawns for whose benefit?
You, and many others, are generalizing. Not all Muslims are Jew hating terrorists, just like all Jews are not Muslim hating Zionists. This rampant generalization of mutual hate will only result in mutual destruction. Carry on.
israel will deny it wants to annihilate all arabs(christians included) who get in the way of greater israel even though there are volumes of evidence that is the plan.
You can't get convicted for thinking about a crime. Only for actually doing the crime. Are the Arabs and Christians living and building a life inside of Israel afraid for their lives?
#1 yes they are
#2 there is no "inside" of Israel, it is a non-nation defined to fill all the land that people are shot on so it can be annexed.
'Sheep to the slaughter, on their way to 72 virgins or whatever reward Women and Innocent Children get.'
The woman must get their Hymen repaired, otherwise you are going to have a hell of a job finding 72 virgins, don't know what the kids get, leggo maybe.
Thast my incredibly bad taste comment for the day, I blame it on the heavy duty pain killiers I am on for a back injury.
Thanks George.
Your sanity is greatly appreciated.
Is it liberal to disapprove of killing civilians?
And what if the children being killed in Gaza were Jews?
http://www.thecactusland.com/2014/08/what-if-children-dying-in-gaza-were...
Thanks for the excellent link.
If it is good enough for Israel it is good enough for Russia to deal with KIev and good enough for India to deal with Islamabad
Good thing we Z-Hedgers are not two armed opposing groups stuck on some chuck of desert land.
Bloodshed to rival that spilled in Gaza
israel is the most satanic wicked state on the planet....it is a colony of the rothschilds who use it to achieve their genocidal goals...these ziocons murderers have been behind ww1, ww2, 9/11, and all conflagrations great and small in between...the murderer jews blew up the king david hotel in 1946 so that they could blame it on the arabs....the ziocon murderer ariel sharon boasted to a reporter in 1983 that he killed jews for international sympathy because he could blame it on arabs....and most recently a piece of shit jew - a government official - in israel stated that all of gaza should be annhiliated....see yesterday's veterans today for details.
besides love of murder, what is motivating the genocide in gaza? oil for one, and hatred for another....massive oil pools lie off the coasts of israel, gaza, and probably lebanon....the murderers want the war to steal oil for their murdering ways and will not under any circumstances allow the arabs to share in the wealth...
Bahahaha! I think you missed a couple of conspiracy theories. Try harder.
Ridiculous - the people who do this are the most satanic - https://www.facebook.com/OfficialRightWingNews/photos/a.401034789956656....
Facebook.........the ultimate news source for the mentally handicapped. Well done sir!
LOL AT THE MORON who gave a down vote - so killing a girl because she was raped is not satanic - you must be muslim
Maybe George Washington Blog takes his name from the Bridge.
The 9-11 George Washington Bridge Van - Further DetailsCivilians are simply collateral to the NWO MIC, of which Israel is a major player.
CNN also reported the arrests (on 9/11) in question:
Not until one or the other is 100 % combat-tapped out will this ever end...
"By Way of Deception"
How many suspicious sightings of Mossad operatives in New York City on 9/11 does anyone need?
Trucks in Lower Manhattan. Vans stopped with Israelis, in which bomb-sniffing dogs detected residue. Celebrating "Dancing Israelis" in Liberty Park. Art students at numerous restricted sites DAYS AND WEEKS PRIOR TO 9/11.
BY WAY OF DECEPTION
Funny because Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld would have to have orchestrated and covered up 911 - not the mossad. Rumsfeld announced the day before there was 2.3 trillion missing from the pentagon and then poof the pentagon office up in smoke - Kanter fitzgerald were investingating the missing $ and poof up in smoke - building 7 was where the cia. fbi headquarters were also investingating the missing $ - poof! Do not see a whole lot of mossad in that!
Why I can't Forgive the Jews... http://www.westernjournalism.com/cant-forgive-jews/
Q. Whats the difference between Israel and ISIS?
A. Nothing.
If you believe that, you are seriously uninformed.
"Palestinians “should perish from the world” and that “it is forbidden to be merciful to them”; of non-Jews in general, he declared that “Goyim were born only to serve us.” Despite comments like these, his funeral last October was the largest in the country’s history, with 800,000 Israelis attending"
Make all the excuses in the world for the New Nazis.
Or should I say the "Ask-a-Nazis" tribe
Every American should see this - it is Muslims from the USA in their own words when they think the cameras are off - get past the 30 second religious intro into the documentary - oh they have plans for America you dumb sheep -
The Great Deception Now Coming Upon The Worldhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnBYyIhDLWw&feature=youtu.be
haha love the down arrows in 2 seconds - proves you did not listen to the documentary and have no clue what you are downing - gotta love stupid!
People down vote you automatically because they have read your prior posts and have come to the appropriate conclusion that you are a propoganda spewing blunt instrument. But, we do enjoy the comedic value of your "news" sources. Youtube and westernjournalism.com? Really? ROFLOL!!!!
US to Israel........"We're just about to the point where we can't kill anymore without major backlash start holding back a bit."
Hi Netanyahu! You can stay with me!
Boy wouldn't that be like cinderfuckingella showing up on your doorstep!
Google translate tells me that the following message:
Means:
Can any Hebrew speakers confirm whether Google got it right?
Name calling? What you work for Media Matters too?
http://www.people-press.org/files/2014/07/7-28-14-Israel-Hamas-Release.pdf
As fighting continues to rage in Gaza amid calls for a cease-fire, about twice as many Americans say Hamas (40%) as
Israel (19%) is responsible for the current violence.
israel used to post less than 5%. hamas is winning, better yet, palestine is winning.
Screw hamashole terrorist and all of Islam - these people are sick and do not value life - doubt it - listen to this mother - whose child is being saved by Israeli Doctors - Palestinian Mother: “Life is Zero, Life is Worthless…That is Why We Have Suicide Bombers” http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/08/palestinian-mother-life-zero-life-wort...
Israel should wipe them off the Earth - Muslims kill more Muslims than anyone else does - and more of everyone else too! http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/