war crimes |

Jul 16

Homes in the crosshairs: Israeli war crimes, deterrence and impunity

On the eighth day of Israel’s most recent assault on the Gaza Strip, a senior officer in the Israeli military commented on the overnight bombing of the house of senior Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades figure Marwan Issa. “You call it a home”, the anonymous official said, “we call it a command centre and a military post for all intents and purposes”. For all intents and purposes.

NGO B’Tselem has documented ten examples of family homes bombed by Israel with a combined death toll of 52 persons, including 19 children. B’Tselem described the IDF’s justification for such attacks (which, it noted, changed over time), as “unfounded and illegal”, calling the tactic “punitive home demolition from the air”. Read more

Jul 11

Israel’s war on the Palestinian people in Gaza

Israel is at war with the Palestinian people. More accurately, Israel is writing a new, brutal chapter in its ongoing war against the Palestinian people, a horror story stretching back decades, and, appallingly, with more pages to be written. Read more

Aug 27

If Israel continues to target Palestinian families, what’s the point of a ‘peace process’?

Human Rights Watch this weekend released a must-read item on demolitions in Israel that they say are intended “to drive [Palestinian] families off their land”, part of a wider regime of “forcible transfer” and “discrimination”.

The report notes that some 3,800 Palestinians have been displaced by Israeli home demolitions since Prime Minister Netanyahu took office in 2009.

The continuation and even escalation of Israeli violations of international law during peace talks illustrates that the official “peace process” only serves to protect Israel from accountability over its policies. What Palestinians actually need is a protection of their basic rights and an end to the impunity enjoyed by the state of Israel. Read more

Jul 12

Britain re-writes diplomatic protocol to protect Israeli officials

In recent weeks the UK government has once again shown itself to be entirely unwilling to hold Israeli war crimes suspects to account, to the extent that the Foreign Office is leaving its procedures open to ridicule.

At the end of last month, IDF Major General (res.) Doron Almog was scheduled to visit Britain in order to meet with the UK Task Force, an organisation that coordinates engagement by Jewish groups on issues relating to Palestinian citizens of Israel. Almog was presumably invited in his capacity as “chief of staff” for implementing a pending Israeli government plan to forcibly displace tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev. But the military man is perhaps better known for narrowly escaping arrest in 2005 at Heathrow airport, after a warrant was issued based on allegations of war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip. Read more

Dec 29

IDF chief of staff hails 2008 Gaza strike as an “excellent operation”

This week marks three years since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, the unprecedented attack on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that killed hundreds of civilians and devastated the besieged territory in 22 days of airstrikes and ground assaults. Disturbingly, the Israeli military is marking the anniversary with praise for the massacre, and threats of a new one. Read more

Oct 8

A very special mission

Last month, on the day that changes in universal jurisdiction law went into effect, Israel’s former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said she “received a phone call” from UK Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould telling her “there is no longer a warrant for my arrest”.

Yet when Livni arrived in Britain on Thursday, something went wrong. In what was billed as a “test case” for a law designed to remove the threat of arrest for visiting Israeli officials, Livni only avoided a warrant due to a legal assessment by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) that she was on a “Special Mission”. Read more

Dec 27

‘Punish, humiliate, terrorise’

As the one year anniversary of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip is marked, it is vital to re-examine Operation Cast Lead within the wider context of Israel’s approach to both Gaza and the Palestinians.

There is a danger that the scale of the devastation and the international protests which followed the war can deflect attention from the broader Israeli policies of collective punishment and deliberately-engineered socio-economic collapse.

The first important part of this context for both before – and since – Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip is the crippling blockade. Read more

Jul 28

Lies and Israel’s war crimes

This month marked six months since the “official” conclusion to Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, “Operation Cast Lead.” From 27 December to 18 January, the might of the one of the world’s strongest militaries laid waste to a densely-packed territory of 1.4 million Palestinians without an escape route.

The parallel propaganda battle fought by Israel’s official and unofficial apologists continued after the ceasefire, in a desperate struggle to combat the repeated reports by human rights groups of breaches of international law. This article will look at some of the strategies of this campaign of disinformation, confusion, and lies — and the reality of Israel’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Very early on in Operation Cast Lead, the scale of Israel’s attack became apparent. In just the first six days the Israeli Air Force carried out more than 500 sorties against targets in the Gaza Strip. That amounted to an attack from the air roughly every 18 minutes — not counting hundreds of helicopter attacks, tank and navy shelling, and infantry raids. All of this on a territory similar in size to the US city of Seattle. Read more

Jan 20

Israel wanted a humanitarian crisis

The scale of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip, and the almost daily reports of war crimes over the last three weeks, has drawn criticism from even longstanding friends and sympathisers. Despite the Israeli government’s long-planned and comprehensive PR campaign, hundreds of dead children is a hard sell. As a former Israeli government press adviser put it, in a wonderful bit of unintentional irony, “When you have a Palestinian kid facing an Israeli tank, how do you explain that the tank is actually David and the kid is Goliath?”

Despite a mass of evidence that includes Israel’s targets in Operation Cast Lead, public remarks by Israeli leaders over some time, and the ceasefire manoeuvring of this last weekend, much of the analysis offered by politicians or commentators has been disappointingly limited, and characterised by false assumptions, or misplaced emphases, about Israel’s motivations. Read more

Jan 16

This is not a balanced conflict

EVENTS in the Gaza Strip are so fast-moving that, when you read this, the statistics will be outdated. As a surgeon in Gaza City commented, there is simply “too much happening for the media to cover”. But, though it is difficult to convey the impact, it is possible to give an idea.

At the time of writing, about 900 Palestinians have been killed and more than 3500 injured: more than half of the casualties are civilians, and as many as one in four of the victims is a child. Despite its statements that it is aiming at only “terrorist” targets, the Israeli military has hit blocks of flats, refugee camps, passing cars, a market place, mosques, a university, clinics and ambulances, schools, harbours, and even a bird farm. The infrastructure of normal life has been obliterated in a territory the size of a decent-sized European city and already reeling from a siege and Israeli policies of isolation that go back about 20 years. Government ministries have been destroyed, and access to water, electricity, and basic foods has been severely affected. This week, Israel is being accused of war crimes in the Gaza Strip by agencies such as the United Nations, the Red Cross, and international and local human-rights groups. Read more