Facing Rights Accusations, Israel Opens Gaza Inquiries
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Version 0 of 1. JERUSALEM — The Israeli military announced Saturday that it had ordered criminal investigations of its own actions in eight additional incidents in the Gaza Strip during the war this summer, and provided unusually detailed justifications for seven other operations that had prompted complaints from human rights groups. The new investigations join five others that began shortly after the Aug. 23 cease-fire that ended 50 days of fighting between Israel and Palestinian militant groups in Gaza. They come after withering accusations of war crimes by Amnesty International, and ahead of an inquiry by the United Nations Human Rights Council. “Even in the fog of war, there are things that we expect ourselves to abide by,” said Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman. “It’s important to see that we are looking at these exceptional incidents with a magnifying glass.” Bill van Esveld, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, said that “it is positive” to see more investigations, but that after a previous Israeli operation in Gaza, Cast Lead, in 2008-’09, the military reviewed “scores of attacks” and convicted only three soldiers of wrongdoing, with “the longest sentence imposed on someone who stole a credit card.” “The poor track record of past investigations and the lack of accountability don’t give much hope that the same process will yield a just outcome this time,” he said. One of the new cases in which the military is considering criminal charges concerns the July 20 bombing of the Abu Jama family home in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. A report by Amnesty International in November said 25 members of the family, 19 of them children, were killed by an airstrike that flattened the three-story building. A member of the armed wing of Hamas, the Islamist movement that dominates Gaza, was nearby and was also killed. Amnesty called it “a grossly disproportionate attack,” saying that the airstrike should have been canceled or postponed “as soon as it was evident that so many civilians were in the house.” The military said it would also investigate the deaths of two Palestinian ambulance drivers killed in separate episodes by Israeli fire; four cases of reported looting of abandoned homes in Khan Younis and the border village of Khuza’a; and allegations that troops fatally shot a man holding a white flag in Khuza’a and used his relatives as human shields. But the 21-page report also said no wrongdoing had been found in seven cases, including strikes on two hospitals, an ambulance, a clinic for the disabled, a Red Crescent station and a United Nations office. The military said that Al Wafa Hospital, which was bombed repeatedly in July, was used by Hamas to surveil and fire at Israeli forces, that rockets were launched from “the immediate vicinity,” and that “reliable information” indicated that patients and staff had been evacuated ahead of the attacks. “Hamas disregarded advance warnings and continued in its military use of the hospital compound,” the report said, “thereby resulting in the loss of the special protection from attack provided to the hospital under international law.” Hamas officials could not be reached Saturday night. The military said it was unaware that the clinic, where two women were killed in a July 12 airstrike, was in the same building as a weapons depot it was targeting, and that residents did not respond to warning shots and phone calls. The fact that civilians were harmed was “indeed a regrettable result,” the report said, “but it does not affect its legality post facto.” Regarding the Red Crescent station, in Jabaliya, the military said that Palestinians were using underground rocket-launchers “a few tens of meters away,” and that the Israeli attack was planned at night to minimize damage to the station, which it called “unavoidable.” Mr. van Esveld of Human Rights Watch said that in two of the seven closed cases, witness accounts collected by his group differed sharply from the military version. More broadly, both he and Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, said focus on specific cases can distract from bigger-picture questions about Israel’s prosecution of a war that killed nearly 2,200 people and destroyed thousands of homes in Gaza. |