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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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The only real recourse that we see is to the International Criminal Court.
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[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.
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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.
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Seems like George didn't lose all those downvotes you got, just the hasbaRAT and assorted delusional Jews hanging about.
Starting with you first!
Yeah.....you're point ?
My point was we don't need anymore useless creatures. If anyone advocates getting rid of them, I say we begin with them first.
W
http://www.radioislam.org/islam/roligt/lobby/jewish_lobby.jpg
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/img/arabcartoons06.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_uPzsiWdvLoQ/S-Yf0k4DySI/AAAAAAAACcI/zvHDDCFO32...
Much of the world has contempt for you and your kind.
Have a nice day pumpkin!
Uummmm.......who would that be Cluck ?
Tick tock....still waiting for an answer, bitch.
Fuck off cunt! I was making dinner for those I care for. I have little use in answering you on your time.
Those deemed useless are usually done by those who think they're better than others. Sound familiar Mr. Talmud?
Still waiting on the answer, bitch.
I want you to SAAAAYyyyyyy the word we all know you want to say.....Colon Klunk. Usually goes hand in hand with "The Final Solution".
But I see you're WAAAayyyyy too pussy to say that.
Fuck off to Stormfront.org, troll.
In no way was I inferring the jewish people. Shocking huh? My point was the elite refer to people as useless eaters. They believe life (if not theirs) has little value, unless it serves them.
Only bitch I see around here is you. I think I've said enough that people know I'm not a pussy to say whatever I want.
Only time I've been to Stormfront is when I link or search has taken me there. The place is a bit too narrow minded for me. I'm happy forming my own opinions based on the facts.
Eat a back of dicks, cock boy!
all those employees at Buchenwald, Dachau, and the dozens of other camps went home and made dinner for those they cared for. They were wonderful family men and women. What's your point you blood dripping beast? Dumkopf.
Well good I didn't work in all those camps.
Only blood dripping beast I see here currently is your jewish blood dripping hands.
Take flight felcher and fuck off! I wasn't talking to you six point.
EDIT: Wow, so there were now dozens of concentration camps? Are we now up to 12 million jews murdered by Nazis?
Somehow I can't see V on the Zionist side.
But I haven't watched the movie/read the comic in a while.
Who said I'm a zionist? I'm anti-hamas, anti-sharia, anti-isis, anti-muslim brotherhood etc.
Thats very much in keeping with V, maybe you should watch the movie ;-)
I didn't say you were a zionist. Just on their side. V stood against arbitrary, authoritarian power- look at the Israel/Palestinian situation and it's not hard to figure out who is who.
Anywho. I'll dig out the comic again. Maybe I'm confusing it with Maus.
V was (and is) an idea. And he never hid behind the skirt of Evey ;-)
Isreal is NOT hiding behind America's skirt, if that's what you're implying.
They could get along just fine without our weapons, money, intelligence and seat on the security council.
so there. :0)+
what rubbish. Are you dumb enough to believe it? Seriously?
Israel rec'd almost no aid until after the 1967, Six Day War.
Not my down, my up.
What I'm saying is, if Israel was the great evil everyone says it is, they would not have stopped, no one stopped them they stopped themselves, they would not have phoned-emailed-tweeted-texted "palestinians" (whatever the hell that is) to get out of their homes because ISRAEL knew Hamas was firing from that home or was storing munitions there to be fired at them and they were going to hit it.
And many times they still didn't.
Point is, they have it within their power right now to turn every nation that funds Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood-jihad into ash.
So the question is, which side is actually showing restraint under the circumstances?
We aren't going to agree, so how bout we fuck?
but, seriously, it's not genocide till it's a done deal. So let's get back together in a few years and rehash over babkas.
Or grits & eggs, my treat...lol.
But seriously, three (so far) have a problem with my interpretation of V and the way he fought government tyranny (Hamas is part of the government of "palestinians" by the way).
Says a lot about this room...and about the perils of "democracy". Which was one of the daggers used by me, completely unseen, until now.
Much too late for the victims I'm afraid ;-)
I do remember the sympathetic reporter character had a Koran hidden in his apartment which the state had made illegal.
That gave me a clue as to the direction- the "idea" if you will- the V character was headed.
He was hiding state mandated "illegal things". Not just a Koran. And that is the direction V is and the reporter was. They could appreciate and respect many things for what they were to them & others.
I can appreciate a statue of Vishnu without an overpowering desire to smash it to bits just because I'm a Protestant (there, I said it, sorry to all my Catholic friends...lol) others can't and would use the state (or the state use them) to do it.
Thats what V is ultimately, fighting against a tyrannical state, whether populary elected by half wits or assuming powers not given unto itself.
V is not a Occupy Wallstreet sit in, which will come as a shock to those who have invested so much time & energy into the promotion of V as an agent of "change" in the government "doing something" about their plight. V has always wanted less government, not moar, so that whole deal was pretty strange.
I'm anti-hamas, anti-isis, anti-muslim brotherhood etc.
I'm also anti-genocide, anti-mass murder, anti-slaughter, anti-war crimes ... NO MATTER WHO DOES IT ... even INCLUDING my own country - USA - or Israel.
Liar
Why not just say you are anti-Imperialist?
GW--What a bunch of shit. If what you are saying had any validity, the 3rd Reich would still rule the world. Imperial Japan would rule the Pacific. etc.etc.
Just how do you propose to fight evil regimes? What is YOUR military strategy for Israel to stop the rockets and tunnels? got a "humane" way?
You are just an anti-Jew POS. And frankly, it is dumbasses like you that evil takes advantage of. You are duped by evil. By not stopping the likes of Hamas, Islamo-fascists are on the march. god you people are stupid.
funny how people can say the most outlandish, hyperbolic, callous things about Arabs or Muslims and no one says they're "anti-Arab".
Meanwhile...
http://beirut.indymedia.org/images/2004/04/1133.png
Your analogies are backwards The world condemns israel's actions. keep trying
First of all, how do you know I am not Jewish? Maybe I'm Jewish?
Second of all, Big American and British Banks Funded the Nazis.
Maybe a first step in defeating evil is to STOP SUPPORTING IT?!
Still waiting on your humane military strategy.
the old way would have been the declaration of a protectorate under a UN resolution. but nobody is volunteering to do that
G.W. - you irritate the daylights out of me most times. But then I stop and think and realize I'm blaming the messenger for the message. Then I reconsider my attitude toward you.
I appreciate all you do to expose us (me) to the arguments of the other side. Of all the folks writing on ZH, I think you have educated me the most. I don't care for the message. But thanks for the education.
Because if you were your name would be George Jerusalem? hahaha
Just having a little fun GW!
got a "humane" way?
Yes, there is a humane way. That is through a negotiated peace acceptable to both side.
Why do you think those rockets are being fired? Remove the reason why these rockets are fired and they will stop.
You cant be that stupid. Negotiated peace. Hamas is an Iran Hizballah proxy. Their sole reason for existance is to be Hizballah South. To wipe Israel off the map. Not going to happen.
They have zero reason to shoot rockets. Israel left Gaza Jew Free (Judenrein) with millions in agricultural assets in '05. That was their GOLDEN opportunity to show they can transition from armed resistance to a peaceful society. Take their 100's of millions of Western Welfare money and turn Gaza into paradise on the Med. They COULD HAVE SAID...look! We transistioned, we are peacful, now....we want the same in the WB! Israel would have had no choice but to leave the WB.
But what happened? Elections. Hamas took over in January of '06 (and have not allowed another election) threw Fatah off roof tops and began further armed resistance. Hence the blockcade.
Hamas made their intentions clear from the get go. They want to be Hizballah South. And now their people are suffering. They blew it.
Israel left thousands of greenhouses from which they supplied the region and exported herbs and vegetables.
Hamas and Gaza residents looted them and probably use them as flop houses now.
Forward!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gush_Katif
Hamas does not want peace. They want the Jew dead and or driven completely from Israel.
Might as well let them fight to the death. That's the only way this gets settled.
Hamas and the Palestinians better hope there are WAY more than 70 virgins waiting all the dead men that are coming. For the women.....well....tough. Allah doesn't give a shit about women.
Israel does not want peace. They want the Muslims dead and or driven completely from Palestine.
Both sides are saying the same thing, they only differ on which side they are talking about.
It's a shame.
No Arabs, save the Sheiks, and royal family members live as well, have as much freedom, opportunity for individual self determination than the million plus Arabs of Israel. Funny, they never have left after decades of all this genocide and oppression. History is replete w/ mass migrations to escape oppression and tyranny. The Israelis as best as I can tell haven't constructed an Iron Curtain to keep them in Israel. But, no...not those Israel Arabs/Muslims. Nope...cause they know how they could never live the lives they live in their Arab/Muslim governed nations; whether that be Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, SA, Algeria, on and on and on.
So you're telling me you are both anti-Semitic and Islamophobic?
We can't have that, you need to pick a side, and that will be the side of good, truth and justice. The other side must be exterminated and wiped off the map. For Israel/Palestine was given to the Jews/Muslims by GOD for they are the chosen people.
If you are not with us, you are against us.
<sarc>
Islamophopia doesn't exist. STFU
George, they've put their intentions into words, jihad is death or subjugation and second class citizenship for anyone who is an "infidel" my man, that is you. Do you personally want or do you want ANYONE ELSE subjected to sharia? Do you even know what sharia law is?
It combines the church & state, codifies only one religion into "mans law."
I eagerly await you reportage on the Christians of Mosul and the choices sharia "law" left for them. Give up your beliefs or your money or your house or your life...yes, sounds perfectly reasonable.
But I won't hold my breath.
Oddly enough it seems that Islam's and Jewish teachings are very similar then. Weird considering they came from the same region.
If you're not jewish, you're goy, a subclass.
Nothing odd about it. Islam took from the Tora and Bible parts it liked. The Koran was writen after Mohammad's death based on memories of things said and done by Mohammad. The Koran has gone several changes and today contains 114 surras. Early on, Mohammad liked the christians and jews but later changed his view which today the world gets to experince first hand.
Oddly you say? Islam has plagerized much of its tenents and customs from the other two abramahic faiths. Dummy up
Moo-hamed was too busy fucking prepubescent girls to get his facts straight.
They've been at each others throats for millennia.
But it is of interest only one still (upon conquest) goes to the others churches, synagogues, temples, shrines, statues, tombs etc. and tries to erase any last vestige of it being there.
The other religions, kinda got over it.
(Yes I know about the arms being ripped off statues...lol)
For the "collective" Borgs review...its all about truth, always ;-)
http://westernorthodox.blogspot.com/2006/06/eastern-orthodox-statues.html