'The U.N. has been taken hostage by terrorist organizations'
An Israeli airstrike hits Gaza in July 2014, above. Israel carried out 6,000 such strikes, while Palestinian militants fired more than 6,600 rockets and mortars. Caption, WSJ, photo by Hatem Moussa / AP.
U.N. Cites Possible War Crimes in Gaza Conflict
Israel’s attacks on residential buildings in Gaza, and rocket attacks by Palestinians contributed to violations of ‘humanitarian law’
By Joe Lauria, Wall Street Journal
June 22, 2015
UNITED NATIONS—Both Israel and Palestinian militant groups may have committed war crimes during last summer’s conflict in the Gaza Strip, a United Nations panel reported Monday.
The Israel Defense Forces may be guilty of war crimes for indiscriminate attacks on residential buildings in Gaza, as well as on medical facilities and infrastructure, the report said.
Meanwhile, evidence collected by the commission “strongly suggests” that the “primary purpose” of Palestinian rocket attacks was to “spread terror” among the civilian population, in “violation of international humanitarian law.”
Palestinian armed groups fired more than 6,600 rockets and mortars toward Israel, killing six civilians and injuring as many as 1,600 people, including 270 children.
Israel carried out 6,000 airstrikes in Gaza during the conflict, many hitting residential buildings, the report said. It said 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462 civilians.
“The death toll alone speaks volumes,” said the report by a commission of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
The U.N. found that at least 142 Palestinian families had three or more members killed in the same incident, amounting to a total of 742 fatalities.
“The extensive use by the Israel Defense Forces of explosive weapons with wide-area effects, and their probable indiscriminate effects in the built-up neighborhoods of Gaza, are highly likely to constitute a violation of the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks,” the report said. “Such use may, depending on the circumstances, qualify as a direct attack against civilians, and may therefore amount to a war crime,” it added.
Speaking at Israel’s parliament, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the report biased and accused the human-rights commission of a disproportionate focus on Israeli actions. “Israel does not carry out war crimes,” he said. “Israel defends itself from terror organizations that call for its destruction and carry out many war crimes.’’
A Palestine Liberation Organization statement praised the commission and said it would review the report, but declined to offer further comment.
Ghazi Hamad, a senior official from Hamas, the Islamist group that has ruled Gaza since 2007, told the Associated Press that the U.N. report created a false balance “between the victims and the killers.” He said Hamas rockets and mortars were aimed at Israeli military sites, not at civilians.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, in a Facebook posting, said Hamas welcomed the report for its criticism of Israel. “This means that Israeli leaders must be sued in the international court of justice now,’’ he wrote.
Mary McGowan Davis, chairwoman of the commission, discusses the report Monday in Geneva. Next to her sits commission member Doudou Diene. Photo by Fabrice Coffini / AFP /Getty.
The U.S. is likely to block any discussion of the report in the U.N. Security Council, as it did with a U.N. report by South African jurist Richard Goldstone, when his panel similarly reported on possible war crimes by both sides in the Gaza conflict of 2009.
“We have made clear in the past our concerns about the mechanism of using the commission of inquiry on this and the bias against Israel that is imparted in that mechanism,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “We’ve been very clear from the get-go that we have concerns over the mechanism itself.”
The stakes are higher this time because the Palestinians formally joined the International Criminal Court in April, and soon after the court’s prosecutor began an investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The ICC prosecutor, who hasn’t commented on the report, is expected to draw on the U.N.’s findings. The report called on Israel to join the ICC, and said both Israel and the Palestinians should cooperate with the ICC’s preliminary examination and with any subsequent investigation that may be opened.
The conflict last summer was the third major confrontation between Hamas and Israel. Palestinian officials say rockets from Gaza are fired as resistance against an Israeli blockade, while Israel says it is combating unprovoked terrorism.
For this report, the commission studied a sample of 15 airstrikes on residential buildings, in which Israeli precision weapons were used, mostly at night, killing 216 people, including 115 children and 50 women. The timing of the attacks increased the likelihood that residents, often entire families, would be at home, the report said.
But in six of the cases examined by the commission, the report said there was “little or no information” available to explain why residential buildings were considered to be “legitimate military objectives.”
The commission raised concern that the Israeli strikes “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,” the report said.
Though Israel said artillery was used only on an “exceptional basis” in urban areas, the commission said it found that it and other heavy weaponry were “widely used in residential neighborhoods.”
Israel’s foreign ministry said after the report’s release that the “commission of inquiry’s mandate presumed Israel guilty from the start,” saying the committee lacked tools and expertise to conduct the inquiry. Even so, the foreign ministry said it would study the U.N. findings.
Addressing Palestinian tactics, the report said the “indiscriminate” use of rockets and mortars by armed Palestinian groups against civilians constituted violations of international humanitarian law. “The intent of some Palestinian armed groups to direct attacks against civilians is demonstrated by statements indicating that their intended targets were civilians or large population centers in Israel,” the report said.
The Palestinians’ “primary purpose of the rocket attacks was to spread terror among the civilian population, in violation of international humanitarian law,” the commission reported.
Last week, in an effort to pre-empt the report, Israel’s foreign ministry released its own 276-page report on the fighting. In contrast with the U.N. numbers, it said that 36% of the deaths were civilians, 44% were militants and 20% were undetermined.
The Israeli foreign ministry report argued that its military made an effort to avoid civilian casualties and acted in line with international warfare norms, but the military was ultimately unable to avoid civilian deaths because the fighting took place in densely populated Gaza neighborhoods.
However, an Israeli nongovernment group that collected anonymous testimonies from Israeli combatants recently released a report complaining of “massive and unprecedented harm” to Gaza civilians and infrastructure. The report, by Breaking the Silence organization, accused the military of following a policy that called for “minimum risk” to Israeli forces even at the risk of harming civilians.
Joshua Mitnick in Tel Aviv and Felicia Schwartz in Washington contributed to this article.
Note
From the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human RIghts
Mary McGowan Davis (United States of America) served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York and as a federal prosecutor during the course of a 24-year career in the criminal justice sector in New York City. She also has extensive experience in the fields of international human rights law and transitional justice. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association for the International Commission of Jurists and the International Judicial Academy, and serves on the Managerial Board of the International Association of Women Judges. Justice McGowan Davis also served as a member and then Chair of the UN Committee of Independent Experts tasked with following up on the findings of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza conflict occurring between December 2008 and January 2009.
Doudou Diène (Senegal) was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance from 2002 to 2008 and the Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Côte d’Ivoire from 2011 to 2014. He is also a former Director of the Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue Division of UNESCO. He is a Member of the Board of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Mr. Diène holds a doctorate in public law from the University of Paris and a law degree from the University of Caen (France).