“The only sure-fire way not to be accused of war crimes is simply not to commit them”


General view of the wall of separation between Ramallah and Jerusalem, July 9, 2012.

Avner Gvaryahu writes in IMEMC News FEB 26, 2021With every settlement and military operation, ‘Israel’ has been paving its own road to The Hague, Avner Gvaryahu, the executive director of Breaking the Silence wrote.

He was born and raised in a religious-Zionist family. He joined the Israeli army as a paratrooper in 2004, and served as a sniper team sergeant in a special operations unit, mostly around Nablus and Jenin.

After his military service, Avner became involved with Breaking the Silence where he has served as Jewish Relations Coordinator for the past year.

Breaking the Silence, as it describes itself, is an organization of veteran soldiers who have served in the Israeli military since the start of the Second Intifada and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories.

Avner said that the decision released by the International Criminal Court on Feb. 5, which confirmed that its jurisdiction extends to territories occupied by ‘Israel’ in the 1967 war, clearing the way for its chief prosecutor to open a war crimes probe into Israeli war crimes, may have been delivered by a panel of international judges, but it is very much an “Israeli production.”

“We have occupied land, built settlements, and whitewashed outposts as if there were no tomorrow, no Palestinians, and no world watching,” he said. “In short, we ended up in The Hague because it was precisely where they have been heading for a very long time.”

During the war on Gaza in the summer of 2014, the Israeli military killed 2,202 Palestinians, nearly two-thirds of whom had no part in the fighting and 526 of whom were children. According to B’Tselem, 18,000 homes were destroyed or severely damaged, and more than 100,000 people were made homeless.

When asked about the Israeli army’s rules of engagement in Gaza, one soldier who testified to Breaking the Silence, explained the thinking that led to these horrifying statistics, “If it looks like a man, shoot. It was simple: You’re in a mother****ing combat zone. A few hours before you went in, the whole area was bombed. If there’s anyone there who doesn’t clearly look innocent, you apparently need to shoot that person.”

“Who’s innocent?” the interviewer asked. The soldier replied, “If you see the person is less than 1.40 meters tall, or if you see it’s a lady. You can tell from far away. If it’s a man, you shoot.”

“The real problem is Israel’s wider, official approach to the use of force,” Avner said.

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