BREAKING the Silence, a report on Operation Cast Lead, as Israel called its military attack on the Gaza Strip in December 2008-January 2009, says the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) routinely committed human rights violations during the 22-day siege of Gaza. What lends weight to the 110-page report released on July 15 is the fact that it is based on the testimonies of 30 veterans of the war.
Compiled by a group of Israeli soldiers who fought in the war, it provides graphic details of the targeting of civilians and their property. According to the report, senior IDF officers told the soldiers to shoot first rather than worry about the deaths of civilians. It quotes one of the senior IDF commanders as telling his men: Better hit an innocent than hesitate to target the enemy. Another commander told young soldiers that in urban warfare, anyone is your enemy. No innocents, says the report.
Among the serious human rights violations it details are the use of white phosphorus and the rampant demolition of thousands of Palestinian houses. It mentions a soldier as saying that his unit received an order to ignite an area populated by Palestinians. The way to do that was to actually fire phosphorous shells from above, the soldier says. White phosphorus lets out an umbrella of fire over a targeted house and sets it on fire.
The soldier said in his testimony that while undergoing training he was told that it was inhumane to use phosphorous shells in warfare. International law allows the use of white phosphorus only to obscure troop movement and to prevent the enemy from firing guided missiles.
The IDF also apparently used civilians as human shields. In Israeli army jargon, this is called the neighbour procedure. Palestinian civilians were forced to enter buildings to provide cover for Israeli troops searching for resistance fighters.
The report also highlights the dubious role played by the military rabbis. It gives many instances of the rabbis trying to inculcate messianic zeal into the soldiers. The Palestinians were equated with the Philistines, the tribal enemies of Jews in Biblical days. One rabbi apparently told soldiers during the Gaza War that they were the sons of light and that their fight was against the sons of darkness.
In its summary, Breaking the Silence concludes that the massive destruction inflicted on Gaza was unrelated to any direct threat to Israeli forces and that the rules of engagement were deliberately permissive.
Amnesty International, in a report released earlier, in the first week of July, had accused Israel of breaching the laws of war by putting women and children in harms way. It says women and children were forced to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions. It also notes that the scale and intensity of the attacks were unprecedented and that most of the civilians were killed with high-precision weapons.
The IDF relied on surveillance drones, which have exceptionally good optics that allow a detailed view of the targets. The deaths of so many children and other civilians cannot be dismissed simply as collateral damage as argued by Israel, said Donatella Rovera, the Amnesty official who led the inquiry.
The Israeli Defence Ministry rejected the report compiled by Israeli soldiers and criticised it and the Amnesty report as not containing facts. An Israeli army spokesperson said they were based on hearsay. The Defence Ministrys own inquiry into Operation Cast Lead concluded that the IDF was the most moral army in the world. Defence Minister Ehud Barak, one of the brains behind the assault on Gaza, responded to the Breaking the Silence report with the statement that the Israeli army behaves in accordance with the highest ethical code.
Many human rights organisations have given detailed reports about the way in which the IDF went about targeting civilians and their property. Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard said the Breaking the Silence report showed that the Gaza operation violated the number one principle of the international laws of war that of distinguishing between the civilian population and combatants.
A United Nations board of inquiry investigating alleged Israeli war crimes has also been highly critical of Israels attack on Gaza. It is another story that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has chosen to give the report a quiet burial. Only a summary of the report has been made available. It states that the IDF attacked 53 U.N. installations, including 37 schools. The attack on the U.N.-run school in Jabaliya resulted in the deaths of more than 40 Palestinian civilians. The U.N. Secretary-General limited the scope of inquiry to the attacks on U.N. installations only.
However, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) ordered a separate investigation into all human rights violations by the IDF during the Gaza operations. The four-member U.N. team headed by the eminent South African jurist Richard Goldstone was in Gaza a week before the Israeli soldiers testimonies came out. Israel refused to grant visas to members of the team and they finally entered Gaza through Egypt.
Meanwhile, Gaza, which was in bad shape even before Israel unleashed Operation Cast Lead on its hapless population, is crying out for urgent international attention. Ever since Hamas took over Gaza two years ago, Israel has imposed draconian sanctions on it. Israel seems to have the tacit support of the United States, the European Union and many Arab governments as it seeks to starve the Gazans into submission.
Today there is no industry to speak of in the Gaza Strip. Smuggling of a few essential goods through a labyrinth of tunnels has prevented the collapse of the Gazan economy.
Israeli military assault destroyed 80 per cent of Gazas agricultural output, forcing its population of 1.4 million to depend on humanitarian aid for survival. But Israel is continuing its war on Gaza by other means by drastically curtailing the entry of desperately needed food and other essential supplies.
In his speech in Cairo on June 4, U.S. President Barack Obama called for the speedy reconstruction of Gaza. He said the humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israels security interests. However, he has done nothing to pressure Israel into lifting its economic blockade. The tough stance he initially took against Israels colonisation process is now being considerably watered down.
The international community pledged $5.2 billion towards Gazas reconstruction, but very little of this has reached the place, mainly because of Israeli intransigence and stonewalling. The bombed-out concrete houses are being replaced by ramshackle mud houses because of the lack of cement and other building materials. Thousands of families are still living in rudimentary tents or continue to be exposed to the elements.
A June 2009 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) described Gaza as looking like the epicentre of a massive earthquake. Gazas heath care system after Operation Cast Lead is in disrepair.
Equipment and medicine for the treatment of serious illnesses are unavailable because of the Israeli blockade. Even painkillers and X-ray film developers have been put on the restricted list by Israel. Those seeking treatment in Israeli hospitals have to either agree to be collaborators or wait for months to get clearance from the authorities.
In a new U.N.-sponsored report, a Palestinian human rights group said that pregnant Palestinian women, many of them from Gaza, were chained to their beds until they enter the delivery rooms and shackled once again after giving birth.
The ICRC survey found that over 70 per cent of Gazan families survive on $1 a day. Many Gazans, according to the ICRC report, have exhausted their coping mechanisms. They feel that the international community is now wilfully ignoring their plight and has abandoned them to the mercy of the rabidly right-wing government that has taken office in Israel.
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