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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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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nonsense - Israel et to work, from the 1940s onward, to diminish and erase if possible evidence for centuries of Arab Palestinian life.
Well over 350 villages were razed and renamed. Books and scrolls, particularly related to land ownership, were burned.
For all your focus on Muslim violence, you seem to wholly neglect mentioning massacres by the IDF.
You also seem to lack any understanding of the fact that with 1.2 or so billion Muslims, if "Islam" were per se really about violence, the world would be far more violent than it is.
You also lazily attribute Islamic terror to Muslims, while the US and Israel and UK have killed far, far many more civilians in recent decades.
They've also likely "run" some of the jihadi groups - including "ISIS"
Agreed mnewn.
And I did note, that none of GW's sycophants wanted to defend Hamas' charter/constitution, their own words leading to very real deeds.
Wonder why, was it the shocking intent of violence meant by it, the "genocidal madness" and vitriol of a Hamas government of the "palestinians" that put them off?
Arab Spring sounds so much nicer I guess ;-)
You're cute.
My ass is exit only, sorry, go fish elsewhere.
I didn't mean like that, sister.
Your way of thinking.
It's cute.
Anyway, we'll chat more later, I'm sure.
Peace.
Anytime.
You keep the red herrings, slander & strawmen to a minimum and I'll do the same.
Still...no one has disputed (or can) Hamas' charter down below, very strange ;-)
Why would they? That's as big a red herring as you can find.
And it was more playful banter than anything. Or did you think the internet was for solving problems?
Still, no one has condemned (below) the Hamas charter.
Why not?
Then I guess it makes you anti-semetic too since many of those people are Semites? ;)
Not trying to be anti-social. :grin:
Colonel, keep up that attitude and you'll be in line for a promotion.
General Klink just doesn't have the same ring to it. May have to change my name to General Goy then.
George Washington represents the essence of the left-hand sniffer, CAIR dirty Sanchez movement. How's it taste George?
you represent the reflexive, revolting, and predictable anti-Arab racism and irrationalism of the Israel Firster.
Fuck you, you fucking sack of puke.
Oh boy, here we go again.
This is going to escalate quickly.
Israeli forces in the southern Gaza town of Khuza’a fired on and killed civilians ... Deliberate attacks on civilians who are not participating in the fighting are war crimes.
The most relevant answer that might come out of all of this, in an era and area where every Muslim is considered a soldier in the Jihad war against Zionists, is to the question ... what is a civilian?
To pretend that the definitions from World War I pertain to a Jihad holy war, where even children and donkeys are glorified for being suicide bombers, is foolishness.
True.
We have to ask the bigger questions.
Why did we establish a Jewish State in the Middle East?
The Palestinians have legitimate gripes, but so would Christians over Nineveh and much of the Middle East.
Vinegar and Oil don't mix, who benefits from putting them together and shaking things up?
Dumb and dumber. Makes no sense. Unless you want to re-inflame the Crusades when your real goal is the OIL and a foothold near Russia.
Ukraine and the stupidity there all related - along with bankster wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.
This is not about families and civilized people, it is about Money, or Mammon as the Bible says.
Actually, if you are going to invoke the Bible - putting Israel back into their God-given land (originally "given" to them by taking it away from someone else) is about the fulfillment of prophecy. And if that is true, then there are some spectacular fireworks still coming, so that God can prove himself by rescuing Israel from a final destruction that seems certain until His intervention. If it is true, we could use more popcorn. It will be an interesting ride - assuming it happens in our lifetime.
"Israel" was destroyed long, long ago. It seems to have been quite different from Judea. Judaism came from Judea by way of Babylon - not Israel.
They named it 'Israel' to fool idiots like you. By all accounts the Israelite tribes were "lost" and the single Egyptian reference to Israel is that Pharoah destroyed them... many centuries before the 2nd [really 3rd] Temple was destroyed.
My comment stands.
If you know the Bible, you understand that. If you don't know the Bible, this is not the place to educate you on the detail to which I referred. Note that these responses are pointing to the past. The prophecy to which I referred, and the many different interpretations of it, point to the future. So your responses are rather irrelevant to my comment. And note also the word if that I included in my comment.
Are you retarded? God took away the land as surely as He gave it due to the "chosen" people failing. They are failing big time. You have to be insane to think God wants zionists to control Jerusalem and shell children.
I wasn't invoking the Bible; using it as a cultural reference - not "invoking".
Several have commented "What is this Mammon crap?" when I have used the term.
It is MONEY, ostentatious wealth, gluttony; sounds like America today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon
if you pose that question don't get worked up about 9/11
You mean all those folks in the twin towers going around dressed in their work clothes and carrying backpacks filled with explosives?
how dare you suggest that the only spies arrested on 9/11 were Israelis - that's antisemitic!!!
You mean all those "patriotic", slack-jawed, authority-worshipping, anthill collectivist flag-humpers falling all over themselves to "support the troops" and be herded/false-flagged into the next idiotic war of aggression?
If we want to know what you think we'll check out the boob tube. You are superfluous.
Nothing in my comments above tell you what I think.
And let me guess what you won't hear:
Western Ukraine warplanes and artillery are targetting civilians in Eastern Ukraine (at least the ones that they can't burn to death inside buildings)
ISIS is targeting civilians in Syria and Iraq - not with artillery, but with bullets to the back of the head or with machetes to remove heads.
Saudi Arabia is targeting...
Yemen is targeting...
Al Qeada is targeting...
China is targeting...
The US is targeting....
Etc, etc, etc.... It's a dangerous world!
Human Rights Watch says that Pro-Russian Insurgents specifically targert Medical Providers!!!
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/08/05/ukraine-insurgents-disrupt-medical-se...
that's anti Russian racism!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
waaaaaaaaaaaaaah
waaaaaaaaaaaaaah
[just seeing if the Israel Firster approach works in other contexts]
Haha Nope I guess they don't get to play that card. Either way a human life is a human life in my eyes, that is why I am able to look at Israel and condemn them for killing so many innocent people and I am also capable of looking at ISIS, Hamas, etc and condemn them for killing innocent people.
Basically all this death and destruction caused by selfishness, greed, zealotry, and the inability to get along... no matter who is commiting it truely sickens me.
Waste of bandwidth here. I didn't even read it all honestly. Same stupid shit. Hamas are cocksuckers. Elect cocksuckers pay the price. Fatah sold out their own because the Islamist tribes dont real give a fuck about their own. But we are supposed to.
We have our own elected cocksuckers to endure. Not enough time for gaza. And yes my god look at Syria if you actually give a shit about atrocities. Or Iraq of Ukraine or stay tuned. So much high school girl drama with Israel. Just fuckin let it go.