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U.N. Report on Gaza Finds Evidence of War Crimes by Israel and by Palestinian Militants U.N. Report on Gaza Finds Evidence of War Crimes by Israel and by Palestinian Militants
(about 9 hours later)
JERUSALEM — A United Nations investigation found “serious violations of international humanitarian law” that “may amount to war crimes” by both Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip during their bloody battle last summer, according to a report released on Monday in Geneva. JERUSALEM — A United Nations Commission of Inquiry on last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip — taking pains to be evenhanded — found that both Israel and Palestinian militants were responsible for violations of international law that could amount to war crimes. But each side interpreted the commission’s long-awaited report according to its own version of the Middle East conflict.
The report, written by a two-member independent commission of inquiry and submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council, said that “impunity prevails across the board” regarding the actions of Israeli forces in Gaza, and it called on Israel to “break with its recent lamentable track record in holding wrongdoers accountable.” In the 217-page report, submitted on Monday to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the two commissioners said the militants clearly wanted to sow terror among Israeli civilians, just as they said they could not find clear evidence of why Israel targeted residential buildings in Gaza late at night, risking mass civilian casualties.
As for Palestinian armed groups, the commission cited the “inherently indiscriminate nature” of rockets and mortars fired at Israeli civilians, condemned the killing of people suspected of being collaborators, and said that the Palestinian authorities had “consistently failed” to bring violators of international law to justice. The Commission of Inquiry’s chairwoman, the American jurist Mary McGowan Davis, said at a Geneva news conference that the investigation had gathered testimony “in a scrupulously objective fashion.”
“Comprehensive and effective accountability mechanisms for violations allegedly committed by Israel or Palestinian actors will be a key deciding factor of whether Palestinians or Israelis are to be spared yet another round of hostilities and spikes in violations of international law,” the report said. Still, each side in the long-running conflict saw what it wanted in any such report: Israelis condemned it as further evidence of bias against them in the United Nations writ large, while Palestinians embraced it as further ballast in their bid to punish Israelis in the International Criminal Court — and the court of international public opinion.
The report is expected to serve as a road map for the inquiry into possible war crimes already underway by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. The report, written by Ms. McGowan Davis and Doudou Diene, a lawyer from Senegal, said that “impunity prevails across the board” regarding the actions of Israeli forces in Gaza, and it called on Israel to “break with its recent lamentable track record in holding wrongdoers accountable.”
Israel last week published an extensive report arguing that its soldiers and commanders adhered to all international laws, and placing the bulk of the blame for Palestinian civilian deaths on Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza and led the fight against Israel. As for Palestinian armed groups, the panel cited the “inherently indiscriminate nature” of rockets and mortars fired at Israeli civilians, condemned the killing of people suspected of being collaborators, and said the Palestinian authorities had “consistently failed” to bring violators of international law to justice.
“We are not here to deliver a guilty verdict with respect to any party,” said Mary McGowan Davis, who led the inquiry, at a news conference in Geneva. She emphasized that the commission was not a judicial process but had collected testimony “in a scrupulously objective fashion” that could lay the basis for a “more thorough investigation” of what happened in Gaza and in the West Bank. Despite the February resignation of the inquiry’s original leader, William Schabas, after Israel complained of his having advised the Palestine Liberation Organization, some Israeli leaders and news organizations continued to refer to it as “the Schabas report” for effect. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the document “flawed and biased” and said the Human Rights Council “has a singular obsession with Israel.” (In fact, it also has Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Syria and other countries on its agenda.)
The most the commission could hope for, Ms. McGowan Davis said, was to “push the ball of justice further down the field,” and persuade governments to address “the crying need” for changes in policies regarding the use of weapons with a wide-area effect in densely populated areas. She said the commission also wanted governments to hold accountable those who did not give meticulous attention to protecting the lives of civilians in the conduct of hostilities. The reaction to the report embodied Israel’s mounting attacks on the United Nations in recent months, with the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, saying that “the U.N. has been taken hostage by terrorist organizations, and in this battle the international community will lose.”
The report, which will be discussed by the Human Rights Council this month, questioned why Israel’s political and military leadership had not changed its course of action despite considerable information about civilian deaths. That “raises questions about potential violations of international humanitarian law by these officials, which may amount to war crimes,” it said. Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, on the other hand, assessed the report as a “clear condemnation” of Israel that demonstrated why Israel should be held accountable for war crimes. It ignored or dismissed the report’s criticism of its own actions. And Saeb Erekat, a P.L.O. leader, praised what he called “these esteemed bodies of international law.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel quickly condemned the report as “biased,” noting that the Human Rights Council addresses Israel “more than Iran, Syria and North Korea together,” and pointed to recent reports by retired American and European generals that praised the Israeli military’s conduct. The report said “the scale of the devastation was unprecedented” in Gaza, tallying more than 6,000 airstrikes, 14,500 tank shells and 45,000 artillery shells unleashed between July 7 and Aug. 26. The hostilities also “caused immense distress and disruption to the lives of Israeli civilians,” it said, counting 4,881 rockets and 1,753 mortars fired by Palestinians during that period, and extensively discussing the tunnels militants used to infiltrate Israeli territory. Of the death toll of 2,252 Palestinians, the report said 65 percent were civilians; Israel says it has documented militant activity by at least 44 percent of the dead.
“Israel does not commit war crimes — Israel defends itself against a terror organizations that calls for its destruction, and commits many war crimes,” Mr. Netanyahu said at a meeting of his party in Parliament on Monday afternoon. “We will not sit and did not sit with folded hands,” he added. “We will continue to act with strength and determination against anyone who tries to harm us and our citizens, and we will do this according to international law.” The report could serve as a road map for the preliminary examination already underway by the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor. The Palestinians are expected to present their own files to the court regarding Israeli crimes on Thursday.
The United Nations report condemned Israel’s restrictions on Gaza residents’ travel and trade, saying “the blockade and the military operation have led to a protection crisis and chronic, widespread and systematic violations of human rights.” Israel — and Hamas — refused to cooperate with the inquiry. Israel barred panel members from entering both its territory and Gaza to conduct research.
The commission said that “the scale of the devastation was unprecedented” in Gaza, where it counted 2,251 Palestinian deaths and 18,000 homes destroyed, and also cited “immense distress and disruption” to Israeli civilians, along with $25 million in civilian property damage. The commission’s report is the latest and arguably most damning United Nations inquiry into the 2014 Gaza war. In April, a separate board of inquiry appointed by the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, found that Israeli military action had killed 44 civilians taking shelter inside United Nations schools, which it said should have been “inviolable.”
Palestinian and Israeli children were “savagely affected by the events,” the report said in a distinct effort at evenhandedness, adding that children on both sides “suffered from bed-wetting, shaking at night, clinging to parents, nightmares and increased levels of aggressiveness.” Monday’s report devoted more space to Israel’s actions, but used similar language to address violations by both sides, and made other efforts at evenhandedness, for instance recalling how three Israeli teenagers were “kidnapped and brutally murdered” and then how a Palestinian teenager was “viciously murdered by being burned alive.”
The Israeli government refused to cooperate with the inquiry, saying it was inherently biased. It cited the militants’ rocket attacks and tunnel infiltrations of Israeli territory first in its summary of findings. It noted that Palestinian groups issued statements saying they were trying to hit Israeli cities, and that their weapons lacked guidance systems to aim at military objectives. The panel concluded that those attacks were “indiscriminate in nature,” suggesting that their main goal “was to spread terror among the civilian population, in violation of international humanitarian law.”
The criticism was initially focused on the original chairman of the panel, William Schabas, a Canadian law professor who resigned in February after a formal complaint by Israel about, among other things, his having worked as a consultant for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Perhaps the harshest condemnation was for the August execution of 21 Gazans suspected of collaborating with Israel, which the report said definitively “amount to a war crime.”
Israeli officials have since pointed to what they see as prejudgments in the commission’s founding resolution, which “condemns in the strongest terms the widespread, systematic and gross violations of international human rights and fundamental freedoms” involved in the “Israeli military assault” on Gaza, saying it “involved disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks.” As for the tunnels, the commission detailed the anxiety they caused Israelis but said it “cannot conclusively determine” why they were built and noted that during the summer they “were only used to conduct attacks directed at” Israeli military posts.
Ms. McGowan Davis, a former justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, replaced Mr. Schabas as head of the inquiry. She postponed the report’s release from March, citing a “need to adjust our work” in light of his resignation, and to “weigh with the utmost objectivity” the large amount of materials submitted to the panel, which conducted interviews in Jordan but was not allowed by Israel to enter Gaza for research. The panel sought to answer the question of whether Israel committed war crimes by painstakingly examining whether the killing of civilians was indiscriminate, whether attacks on military targets were proportional and whether it took sufficient care to prevent civilian casualties. On this, the report was particularly sharp.
Ms. McGowan Davis has also faced scrutiny after being one of the writers of a 2011 report on how Israel handled allegations of operational misconduct during Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2008-9. That report found that Israel had investigated hundreds of allegations but that it had taken little disciplinary action and had never looked into those responsible for planning and managing the operation. Israeli forces frequently used precision-guided missiles, indicating that they were aimed at specific targets, the report said, but many of the attacks came when families were gathered to break the Ramadan fast or were asleep, increasing the likelihood of civilian deaths. In six cases that the panel looked into, they found little or no information to explain why residential buildings “which are prima facie civilian objects immune from attack, were considered to be legitimate military objectives.”
Many Israeli officials and news organizations continued to refer to “the Schabas commission” and “the Schabas report.” Emmanuel Nahshon, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said on Monday that Israel had taken that approach because “we believe that by calling it the Schabas report it positions it the way we want it to be positioned,” and “this reflects the spirit of the whole commission and the mandate.” In another nine cases where militants were inside residential buildings, the panel said there were “strong indications that these attacks could be disproportionate, and therefore amount to a war crime.”
Israeli and Palestinian officials both released statements saying they were still reviewing the findings. But while Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said his government would do so “in line with its staunch commitment to ensuring respect for these esteemed bodies of international law,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the report was “morally flawed from the outset,” and commissioned “by a notoriously biased institution.” Israel’s warnings to Gazans, including “roof-knocks” in which lighter missiles were fired before deadly bombs, “cannot be considered” effective, the report said, because they confused residents and did not give them enough time to evacuate.
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s far-right education minister, went further, calling it “a report with blood on its hands,” and Avigdor Lieberman, the ultranationalist former foreign minister, said that “the picture will always be one-sided” and that “parts of the facts there are simply not true.” Leaflets urging Gazans to leave their homes were also insufficient, the report found, because residents did not know which locations would be hit, and some 44 percent of the coastal enclave was off-limits. “These terrifying circumstances created a sense of entrapment, of having “no safe place” to go,” it added.
Hamas welcomed the report in a statement, declaring that its “clear condemnation” of Israel “requires that its leaders be taken to international war crimes courts, and all international courts, for the crimes they have committed against our people.” One Hamas official, Ghazi Hamad, rejected the report’s suggestion that Palestinians might also have committed war crimes, saying fire from Gaza was aimed at Israeli military sites, not at civilians, and criticizing the report for a “false balance” between victims and killers. The Gaza Commission of Inquiry is hardly the first to compile a mountain of facts, only to be filed away or criticized as biased. A parallel one on Syria has issued eight separate reports on suspected war crimes there, even submitting a list of names of suspects, which is kept under seal by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
An executive summary said the 217-page report was based on 280 interviews with victims and witnesses, many conducted by videoconference, and on 500 written submissions, along with publicly available information, including data from Israeli government websites. So why bother appointing these panels? Advocates point out that there is no statute of limitations on war crimes. Dozens of Bosnian immigrants to the United States are facing deportation on suspicion that they were involved in “ethnic cleansing” and other war crimes 20 years ago during the Balkan wars.
Neither Israel nor Hamas responded to written questions about specific incidents, though the report said that the “commission received full cooperation of the state of Palestine.” The Gaza commission will be discussed by the Human Rights Council next Monday. That will be another occasion for the allies of both sides to use the report’s findings to renew the debate.
The inquiry focused on what the report called “new patterns,” referring to Israeli attacks on homes in Gaza “resulting in the death of entire families”; Israeli ground operations that “leveled urban neighborhoods,” including the use of the “Hannibal directive” when a soldier was believed to have been captured; and Palestinian militants’ “reliance on attack tunnels” into Israeli territory.
Regarding the airstrikes on homes, which several rights organizations also examined closely, the United Nations commission investigated 15 cases that killed 216 people, including 115 children and 50 women.
The report said “precision-guided weapons were used in all cases,” but added “there is little or no information available to explain why residential buildings, which are prima facie civilian objects immune from attack, were considered to be legitimate military objectives.”
“There are strong indications that these attacks could be disproportionate, and therefore amount to a war crime,” the commission wrote. The investigators questioned the effectiveness of Israeli warning mechanisms, including the “knock on the roof,” in which a lighter missile is fired before a heavier bomb.
“The weapons used, the timing of the attacks, and the fact that the targets were located in densely populated areas indicate that the Israel Defense Forces may not have done everything feasible to avoid or limit civilian casualties,” the panel said.
The report found that Israel had used artillery and other “explosive weapons” in residential neighborhoods including Shejaiya, Khuza’a and Rafah. Those attacks “may amount to a war crime” by violating rules of “distinction, precaution and proportionality,” the report said. Attacks on medical facilities and schools serving as shelters for thousands of displaced Gazans, it said, probably violated “the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks,” which would constitute another war crime.
When Israeli commanders believed soldiers might have been taken by Palestinian forces in Shejaiya on July 13 and in Rafah on Aug. 1, the commission “has the distinct impression” that they “disregarded basic principles on the conduct of hostilities.” In Rafah, the executive summary said, “every moving vehicle or person became a potential target.”
The report said Israel had bombarded Gaza with more than 6,000 airstrikes, 14,500 tank shells and 35,000 artillery shells between July 7 and Aug. 26; it counted 4,881 rockets and 1,753 mortars shot by Palestinians toward Israel during that period, and extensively discussed the tunnels militants had used to infiltrate Israeli territory.
The commission said it had been unable to verify Israeli allegations regarding the use of civilian buildings by Palestinian militants, in part because it had been unable to visit Gaza, but said the militants “also put Gazans in danger” by firing “from densely populated areas.”
“In cases where their goal may have been to use the presence of civilians to protect military assets from attack, this would constitute a violation of the customary law prohibition against the use of human shields,” the report said. “The questionable conduct of these armed groups, however, does not modify Israel’s own obligations to abide by international law.”
Throughout, the commission referred mainly to “Palestinian armed groups” generally, rather than Hamas, by far the dominant organization. It did cite Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, as having claimed responsibility for the summary killing of 21 alleged collaborators with Israel, an act which the commission definitively called a war crime.
The commission’s report is the latest and arguably most damaging study by the United Nations into Israel’s conduct during the Gaza conflict. In April, a separate United Nations board of inquiry, appointed by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, found that Israeli actions had led to the deaths of 44 civilians taking shelter inside United Nations schools.
That inquiry criticized the Israelis for attacking “inviolable” United Nations facilities in Gaza, although it did not render an opinion on whether international law had been broken. The report also blamed Hamas for storing weapons in some United Nations facilities that had been evacuated.
In mid-June, Israeli attacks were extensively cited in an annual report on violations of children’s rights. But after intense lobbying by Israel and by the United States — Mr. Netanyahu personally called Mr. Ban — Israel was kept off a list of countries and armed groups that are said to systematically kill and maim children in war.
The report raised what it called “serious concern over the observance of the rules of international humanitarian law concerning the conduct of hostilities.”