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Spoetnik
22-03-09, 16:03
Gaza war crime claims gather pace as more troops speak out
An investigation by a group of former Israeli soldiers has uncovered new evidence of the military's conduct during the assault on Gaza two months ago. According to the group Breaking the Silence, the witness statements of the 15 soldiers who have come forward to describe their concerns over Operation Cast Lead appear to corroborate claims of random killings and vandalism carried out during the operation made by a separate group of anonymous servicemen during a seminar at a military college.

Although Breaking the Silence's report is not due to be published for several months, the testimony it has received already suggests widespread abuses stemming from orders originating with the Israeli military chain of command.

"This is not a military that we recognise," said Mikhael Manekin, one of the former soldiers involved with the group. "This is in a different category to things we have seen before. We have spoken to a lot of different people who served in different places in Gaza, including officers. We are not talking about some units being more aggressive than others, but underlying policy. So much so that we are talking to soldiers who said that they were having to restrain the orders given."

Manekin described how soldiers had reported their units being specifically warned by officers not to discuss what they had seen and done in Gaza.

The outlines of the evidence gathered comes hard on the heels of the disclosure by the Oranim Academy's pre-military course last week of devastating witness accounts supplied by soldiers involved in the fighting, including the "unjustified" shooting of civilians.

The claims appear to add credence to widespread claims of Israeli soldiers firing on civilians, made by Palestinians to journalists and international investigators and lawyers who entered Gaza at the end of the conflict and in its aftermath.

With Israeli newspapers threatening new disclosures, the New York Times has weighed in with an interview with a reservist describing the rules of engagement for the Gaza operation. Amir Marmor, a 33-year-old military reservist, told the newspaper that he was stunned to discover the way civilian casualties were discussed in training talks before his tank unit entered Gaza in January.

"Shoot and don't worry about the consequences" was the message from commanders, said Marmor. Describing the behaviour of a lieutenant-colonel who briefed the troops, Marmor added: "His whole demeanour was extremely gung-ho. This is very, very different from my usual experience. I have been doing reserve duty for 12 years, and it was always an issue how to avoid causing civilian injuries. He said that in this operation, we are not taking any chances. Morality aside, we have to do our job. We will cry about it later."

These are not the first allegations of war crimes levelled at the Israeli military. Last Thursday, the special rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Council, Richard Falk, said that the assault on Gaza appeared to be a "war crime of the greatest magnitude" and called on the UN to establish an experts' group to investigate potential violations.

Attempts by the Israeli media to publish the rules of engagement for the Gaza campaign have been blocked by the military censor, but in the past couple of weeks the contents of those rules have begun to to emerge in anecdotal evidence - suggesting strongly that soldiers were told to avoid Israeli casualties at all costs by means of the massive use of firepower in a densely populated urban environment.

Worrying new questions have also been raised about the culture of the Israeli military, indicating a high level of dehumanisation and disregard for Palestinians among the chain of command and even among the military rabbinate.

An investigation by reporter Uri Blau, published on Friday in Haaretz, disclosed how Israeli soldiers were ordering T-shirts to mark the end of operations, featuring grotesque images including dead babies, mothers weeping by their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques.

Another T-shirt designed for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex" next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A shirt designed for the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion depicts a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills".

The claims have sparked a bitter debate within Israel's defence forces and wider society over the "morality" of the IDF and its behaviour in Gaza.

Since the first claims appeared, other Israeli media have run articles criticising the head of the military academy who revealed the soldiers' testimony, while others have run interviews with soldiers denying that the IDF had been involved in any wrong-doing and questioning the motives of those who had come forward.

"I don't believe there were soldiers who were looking to kill [Palestinians] for no reason," 21-year-old Givati Brigade soldier Assaf Danziger was quoted by Yedioth Aharonot. "What happened there was not enjoyable for anyone; we wanted it to end as soon as possible and tried to avoid contact with innocent civilians."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/22/israel-palestinian-territories-war-crimes

Testimonies on IDF misconduct in Gaza keep rolling in

Further testimonies emerged this weekend of army units adopting lax rules of engagement during Operation Cast Lead. The reports followed Thursday's publication in Haaretz of soldiers' accounts of ethical violations in the Gaza offensive.

On Saturday, Channel 10 showed a documentary that included a security briefing by a company commander on the eve of the Gaza invasion.

"We're going to war," he told his soldiers. "We're not doing routine security work or anything like that. I want aggressiveness - if there's someone suspicious on the upper floor of a house, we'll shell it. If we have suspicions about a house, we'll take it down."

"There will be no hesitation," the commander continued. "If it's us or them, it'll be them. If someone approaches us unarmed, shoot in the air. If he keeps going, that man is dead. Nobody will deliberate - let the mistakes be over their lives, not ours."

A number of officers told Haaretz this weekend that the testimonies did not surprise them, as "anyone with eyes in his head knows that these things happened during the fighting in Gaza."

The soldiers who testified about misconduct "placed a very unpleasant mirror before us," said one officer.

"The chief of staff is deflecting discussion now," said another. "It's much easier to find the rotten apples, but there are many much more basic and deeper questions. It's not just an ethical issue, it's also a question of professionalism. The soldiers' accounts show there are professional difficulties in fighting in such complex territory - that we're just not doing it all that well."

"These aren't problems you can solve with the military advocate general or the chief educational officer," he said.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072811.html

Dit vind ik stukken erger dan die t-shirts.

mark61
22-03-09, 16:10
Gaat daar nu iemand zich afvragen of hij eigenlijk gewoon racistisch is? Of de maatschappij racistisch is? Gaat iemand buiten Israël zich dat afvragen?

Spoetnik
23-03-09, 16:14
'IDF troops used 11-year-old boy as human shield in Gaza'
By The Associated Press
Tags: Gaza Strip, UN, Israel News

Israel Defense Forces soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group of UN human rights experts said Monday.

IDF troops ordered the boy to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa and enter buildings before them, said the UN secretary-general?s envoy for protecting children in armed conflict.

Radhika Coomaraswamy said the incident on Jan. 15, after Israeli tanks had rolled into the neighborhood, was a violation of Israeli and international law.

It was included in a 43-page report published Monday, and was just one of many verified human rights atrocities during the three-week war between Israel and Hamas that ended Jan. 18, she said.

Coomaraswamy accused Israeli soldiers of shooting Palestinian children, bulldozing a home with a woman and child still inside, and shelling a building they had ordered civilians into a day earlier.

Israel?s diplomatic mission in Geneva said it would respond to the allegations later Monday at a session of the UN Human Rights Council.

There also have been allegations that the militant group Hamas used human shields, but UN human rights experts have yet to verify those, said Coomaraswamy.

"Violations were reported on a daily basis, too numerous to list," said Coomaraswamy.

Coomaraswamy, who visited Gaza and Israel for five days in February, said her list constituted "just a few examples of the hundreds of incidents that have been documented and verified" by UN officials who were in the territory.

She was the only one of the nine UN experts who compiled the report that was allowed into Gaza following the war. The experts covered issues ranging from health and hunger to women?s rights and arbitrary executions.

The experts also noted reports that Hamas had committed other abuses. They said Hamas had been unwilling to investigate the allegations.

The report called for Israel to end its blockade of the impoverished territory, where they said more than 90 percent of people are dependent on food aid; allow Palestinians to move between Gaza and the West Bank; and investigate human rights abuses that occurred during the conflict.

Coomaraswamy has been a UN undersecretary-general since April 2006. She formerly headed the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission and reported as a U.N. special investigator on violence against women.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1073243.html

Spoetnik
23-03-09, 16:16
Rights group: IDF killed 16 medical workers during Gaza op
By Amira Hass and Reuters
Tags: human rights, gaza, IDF

Israel Defense Forces soldiers did not consider medical teams as entitled to receive the special protection granted to them within the framework of their duties during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, according to a new report by Physicians for Human Rights due to be released on Monday.

PHR quoted figures issued by the World Health Organization, which showed 16 Palestinian medical personnel were killed by Israeli fire during the offensive and that 25 were wounded while performing their duties.

It said Israel attacked 34 medical care facilities, including eight hospitals.

The report also raises questions of whether IDF soldiers violated the IDF's own ethical code and basic humanitarian values, when they prevented treatment and the evacuation of the wounded and fired at emergency rescue teams and Palestinian medical facilities.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR) described alleged incidents that "reveal that not only did the [military] not evacuate besieged and wounded families, it also prevented Palestinian [medical] teams from reaching the wounded."

PHR's report followed accusations by other human rights groups and Palestinians that Israel's actions during the 22-day offensive in the Palestinian coastal enclave, controlled by the Islamist Hamas group, warranted war crimes investigations.

The Israel Defense Forces said the High Court had dismissed a petition PHR lodged on Jan. 19, a day after the offensive ended, and that the allegations were still being investigated.

"At the conclusion of the fighting, the claims were investigated by the [IDF] in a thorough manner, as were many other issues, in the framework of an expert investigation," the military said in a statement.

"The findings...have not yet been concluded. When they have been finalized, [they] will be presented to the public."

PHR described incidents in which it alleged that the IDF "did not allow the evacuation of injured civilians who were besieged for days at a time and left the civilians without food or water for considerable periods."

In its conclusion, PHR said "on the basis of earlier reports published by PHR-Israel, a dangerous and retrograde trend can be identified of an increasing disregard for the obligation to protect medical personnel during operations."

The Israeli military said its forces were instructed to "act with the utmost caution in order not to cause harm to medical vehicles and medical facilities".

It said Hamas fighters had "methodically made use of medical vehicles, facilities and uniforms in order to conceal and camouflage terrorist activity, and in general used ambulances to carry terror activists and weapons."

Last week, Gaza war veterans gave accounts of the killing of civilians and alleged that there was deep contempt for Palestinians among the ranks.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak responded to those accusations by repeating Israel's description of its forces as the most moral in the world. The military said its military advocate-general had ordered an investigation into the alleged incidents.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights has put the Palestinian death toll during the offensive at 1,434 - 960 civilians, 235 fighters and 239 police. Israeli officials have disputed the figures.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1073191.html