The Osterley Times: Tutu calls for end to blockade of Gaza

The man widely regarded as "South Africa's moral conscience", Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has been dispatched to Gaza by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the deaths of 18 Palestinians from a single family, who were killed by a wave of Israeli artillery shells in Beit Hanoun in November 2006.

He has said that he is in "a state of shock" at what he has found there and has called for an end to what he describes as Israel's "abominable" blockade of Gaza.

"We saw a forlorn, deserted, desolate and eerie place," he said. "The entire situation is abominable. We believe that ordinary Israeli citizens would not support this blockade, this siege, if they knew what it really meant to ordinary people like themselves." The international community was also at fault, he said, for its "silence and complicity".

I have long condemned international support for this blockade and think that the EU are disgracing themselves by taking part in it.

Tutu had been hoping to visit Israel and specifically the town of Sderot, which has frequently come under attack from Palestinian rockets, but Israel have been refusing Tutu entrance - I presume because Tutu famously compared Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to Apartheid - so he has had to enter Gaza from the Egyptian border.

Tutu is well used to dealing with situations like the current one between Israel and Palestine and won the Nobel Prize for his work in opposing the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

He has condemned the "culture of impunity" on both sides of the conflict and has stated that peace will not come to the region until there is accountability and dialogue.

"There can be no justice, no peace, no stability, not for Israel, not for the Palestinians, without accountability for human rights violations," he said. "Israel has admitted it made a mistake but this falls far short of accountability and due redress for victims and their families."

Israel's military has said the shelling in Beit Hanoun was mistaken and was the result of a "rare and severe failure in the artillery fire control system" which created "incorrect range-findings". It said no legal action would be taken against any officer.

However, it is not clear why the artillery weapon was targeted so close to a residential district of Beit Hanoun, nor why shells continued to be fired after the first one hit the house. At least six shells were fired in the space of a few minutes that morning, though some witnesses told Tutu's team that as many as 15 were fired.

Christine Chinkin, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, who travelled with Tutu in his team, said it was her preliminary assessment that the incident was still a breach of international law.

"Firing in a way that cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants is clearly a violation of international humanitarian law," she said. "I don't think that the idea of a technical mistake takes away from the initial responsibility of the action of firing where civilian casualties are clearly foreseeable ... it has to be foreseeable when you give yourself such a small margin that any error has the potential to lead to civilian casualties."

This has long been my problem with the Israeli argument that they are targeting military units. The fact that one is targeting military units does not mean that one can fire into civilian areas, especially when it is easily predictable that such an action will result in civilian deaths.

But as always, and this is what I really like about Tutu, he has been entirely fair and has also condemned Palestinian violence against innocent Israeli citizens.

Tutu met with the former Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh on Tuesday and told him that, while he was opposed to the Israeli occupation, he condemned the rocket fire by militants into Gaza. Tutu said there should be more dialogue with Hamas.

"True security, peace, will not come from the barrel of a gun," he said. "It will come through negotiation; negotiation not with your friends, peace can come only when enemies sit down and talk. It happened in South Africa. It has happened more recently in Northern Ireland. It will happen here too."

Tutu has for a long time compared the situation in Israel with that of South Africa's Apartheid regime and has condemned the culture in the US where, because of the power of Jewish lobbies, criticism of Israel appears to be forbidden.

"People are scared in this country, to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what?

"The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists.

"Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust," he said.

Speaking at a conference called Ending the Oppression in Boston, Archbishop Tutu told delegates Jewish people had been at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

He asked: "Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon?

"Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions?"

Of course, it will come as no surprise to Tutu that an American administration are failing to condemn Israel's actions and are, indeed, offering support. He will well remember the way that Reagan offered a "constructive engagement" policy to the Apartheid South African regime, and advocated "friendly persuasion" rather than sanctions at a time when black South Africans were calling on the world to disengage from this moral wrong.

But eventually, Israel's humiliation of the Palestinians will come to an end, just as Ireland's Protestant's eventually gave up humiliating the Catholics and South Africa's whites eventually gave up humiliating their black population. And, on that day, the US will find that, once again, they were on the wrong side of the moral fence.

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