Editor’s note: This commentary is by Mark Hage, an activist with Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel.
[O]ver 51 days in 2014, in what Israel dubbed “Operation Protective Edge,” its military forces killed 2,251 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the vast majority civilians. Some 299 women and 551 children were among the dead. Eighteen thousand homes and other civilian structures were destroyed.
In a joint report released on Aug. 28, titled “Gaza 2 Years On: Impunity over Accountability,” Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights discuss 27 cases that were filed with the Israeli Military Advocate General and the Israeli Attorney General between September and July 2014, regarding suspected breaches of international humanitarian law and international human rights law.
Two years on, there has yet to be a single Israeli indictment in the cases filed, even though they concerned incidents of:
• Direct attacks on residential buildings also causing many civilian deaths and injuries;
• Direct attacks on children (e.g., the four Bakr children playing on the beach and the Shuhaibar children feeding pigeons on a house rooftop);
• Direct attacks on five United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools that were sheltering civilians;
• Bombing of mosques, hospitals and a shelter for people with severe disabilities;
• Attacks on infrastructure and the municipality workers fixing them.
As of the end of August, 13 of the 27 complaints are still under investigation or have received no response from Israeli authorities.
In addition to the complaints filed jointly with Adalah, Al Mezan filed 107 additional complaints related to attacks during Operation Protective Edge with the Military Advocate General and another Israeli investigatory body, the Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism. And what is the status of these complaints? Al Mezan says it has not been informed of any investigations being opened.
In June 2015, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza war released its findings. They documented numerous allegations of systematic violations of international law, and warned that certain attacks by Israel’s military may have amounted to war crimes.
Israeli Attacks on U.N. schools in Gaza
Several schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza were attacked by Israel in 2014. At one school, in Rafah, a drone strike killed 15 people, eight of them children, and wounded 25.
When the attack was launched, 3,000 civilians were taking shelter in the school, a fact the Israeli military has acknowledged being aware of. So why was a missile fired at the school?
Israel claimed it was targeting three military operatives riding on a motorbike, and that its forces were “not able to discern in real-time the group of civilians that were outside the school” and that “it was not possible to divert the munitions” after the motorbike started to traverse a road bordering the wall that surrounds the school. For these reasons, the Military Advocate General found no breach of international or Israeli domestic law by Israeli commanders or soldiers.
The UN Commission of Inquiry accused Israel’s military of deploying imprecise weapons in this attack and that “The use of such weapons in the immediate vicinity of an UNRWA school sheltering civilians is highly likely to constitute an indiscriminate attack which, depending on the circumstances, may qualify as a direct attack against civilians, and may therefore amount to a war crime.”
Four brothers from the Bakr family were killed by an Israeli attack during Operation Protective Edge. They were playing soccer on a beach.
Human Rights Watch conducted an investigation of three attacks on UNRWA schools in 2014. In respect to the one in Rafah, it refuted the assertion that the Israel military could not have identified civilians near that school in real time and, thus, diverted its munitions. Human Rights Watch, according to Adalah and Al Mezan, concluded that “… in this attack, the munitions used by the Israeli military in fact allows the operator to see the target even after the missile is launched and divert it in midcourse.”
Al Mezan also documented this case. It found that there were two people (not three) on the motorbike, and they were civilians, not combatants.
The Bakr Boys
Four brothers from the Bakr family were killed by an Israeli attack during Operation Protective Edge. They were playing soccer on a beach. Their deaths came in close proximity to a hotel where foreign journalists were staying.
When a complaint over why and how the boys were killed was filed, the Military Advocate General didn’t even bother to collect testimonies from the journalists or Palestinians who were at the site at the time of the killing. It closed the file in June 2015 after concluding that the area where the boys were killed was a legitimate military target.
No justice for Gaza
Israel’s leaders and generals, without a trace of legal or moral unease, describe their periodic military offenses in Gaza as “mowing the lawn.” Be assured that they intend to keep mowing the lawn in Gaza, as they relentlessly advance Israeli’s illegal policies of land confiscations and settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
How can Israel transgress international law for so long, with impunity? Three reasons, primarily:
The White House and Congress, in lockstep with the pro-Israel lobby, refuse to stop the flow of weapons and other military aid to Israel, which is costing Americans more than $3 billion a year.
Successive American presidents have shielded Israel from diplomatic and legal condemnation.
American armament and “homeland security” corporations profit mightily from Israel’s military and occupation. There are consumer-oriented businesses as well, like our own Ben & Jerry’s, which oversee contracts with Israeli franchises that sell products in unlawful Jewish-only settlements. Ben &Jerry’s ice cream was making its way to supermarkets in Israeli settlements last summer while Gaza was burning and the corpses of Palestinian kids were being stored in ice cream freezers because the carnage was too great for Gaza’s morgues to handle.
The latest report from Adalah and Al Mezan underscores that Israel will not, of its own accord, end the occupation and siege of Gaza (or the West Bank), or bring to justice those in its armed forces who wantonly take Palestinian life, no matter their age or civilian status, and sow destruction in violation of international law.
