Most Palestinians killed in Israeli raids were civilians, Amnesty says

During last years military bombardment of Gaza, Israeli Security Forces killed more than 320 Palestinian civilians, a threefold increase on the previous year according to Amnesty International. During this same year 21 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinian militants, the lowest annual figure since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000.

The human rights group's 2007 report says that over half of the more than 650 Palestinians killed in 2006 were civilians, 120 of them children and young people under 18. Amnesty defines civilians, "as people that are reasonably supposed never to have been involved in armed operations".

While Amnesty said that dozens of Palestinians were killed in the West Bank it pointed out that most of the increase resulted from aerial and artillery bombardments in Gaza after the abduction of the Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit in late June and in response to increased Qassam rocket fire on Israel. These included, for example, the shelling of a house in the northern town of Beit Hanoun which killed 17 members of the Athamneh family.

The Israeli assault on Gaza was a war crime as it was an act of collective punishment against a group of people who had nothing to do with the kidnap of Gilad Shalit.

Indeed, it is very hard to think of any other country who would be backed by the US if they launched such a disproportionate response to one of their soldiers being kidnapped. Any other country that launched an aerial and artillery bombardment upon another over the kidnap of a soldier would almost certainly receive America's disapprobation.

Amnesty also accused soldiers and settlers of committing "serious human rights abuses, including unlawful killings against Palestinians mostly with impunity". Although it said settler attacks on farmers in the West Bank had decreased, they were continuing.

It said that, at times, security forces were present at such incidents and did not intervene. It also accused the security forces of often only opening investigations after the cases had been highlighted by journalists and human rights groups.

The Israeli military said yesterday it did its utmost "to avoid harming innocent people... in contrast to terror organisations that do their utmost to harm innocent civilians".

The Israelis often make this claim which is, of course, blatant nonsense. When Olmert strewed cluster bombs over civilian areas in southern Lebanon in the last days of last summers conflict, was he "doing his utmost to avoid harming innocent people"?

Indeed, Israel made a similar claim during the war last summer which was examined by Human Rights Watch and found to be nonsense. Israel claimed that many civilians were killed because Hizbullah were hiding weapons amongst the populace and, whilst there were cases of this happening, in many, many cases of innocent's killed this was found not to be the case.

Human Rights Watch investigated some two dozen bombing incidents in Lebanon involving a third of the civilians who by then had been killed. In none of those cases was Hizbullah anywhere around at the time of the attack.

How do we know? Through the same techniques we use in war zones around the world to cut through people's incentive to lie. We probed and cross-checked multiple eyewitnesses, many of whom talked openly of Hizbullah's presence elsewhere but were adamant that Hizbullah was not at the scene of the attack. We examined bombing sites for evidence of military activity such as trenches, destroyed rocket launchers and military equipment, or dead or wounded fighters. If we were unsure, we gave the IDF the benefit of the doubt.

The case of Kana shows how this works. After two Israeli missiles killed 28 civilians in a house there on July 30, the IDF initially charged that Hizbullah had been firing rockets from the vicinity of the targeted house. But Human Rights Watch investigators who visited Kana found that there had been no Hizbullah presence near the bomb site at the time of the attack. IDF sources later admitted to an Israeli military correspondent that Hizbullah wasn't shooting at all from Kana that day.

In some cases, the IDF trotted out video of Hizbullah firing rockets from a village. But it has yet to show that Hizbullah was in a civilian building or vehicle at the time of an Israeli attack that killed civilians. Blaming Hizbullah is simply not an honest explanation for why so many Lebanese civilians died. And without honest introspection, the IDF can't meet its duty and self-professed goal to do everything possible to spare civilians.

The truth is that "Israeli forces systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon".

One has to remember that the attacks on Gaza were taking place at the exact same time as Israel was bombarding Beirut, and was being conducted with the same reckless abandon. The bombardment of Gaza as a means of rescuing Gilad Shalit was not even what one could reasonably claim was a feasible policy. Indeed, there were many of us who thought the bombardment of Gaza might make it all the more likely that Gilad would be killed. It was an act of revenge upon a civilian population who had done nothing.

When one remembers the wanton destruction of last summer, the destruction of the Beirut's bridges, it's power plants, it's roads, it's buildings, it's airport, it's viaduct; one really has to wonder whether, if that level of damage had been wrought by an East European for the cause of rescuing kidnapped soldiers, if the individual who wrought such damage wouldn't be sitting in the Hague right now.

Click title for full article.