By Amy Teibel
Israeli forces killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians and destroyed thousands of Gaza Strip homes in attacks that amounted to war crimes, Amnesty International charged on Thursday, in the first in-depth human rights group report on the recent war in Gaza.
Amnesty called on Israel to pledge publicly that it would not use artillery, white phosphorus and other imprecise weapons in densely populated areas. And it urged Gaza's militant Hamas rulers to stop rocket fire against Israeli civilians - attacks it also described as war crimes.
Israel and Hamas both denounced the report as unbalanced. Israel charged that Amnesty "succumbed to the manipulations of the Hamas terror organisation" and Hamas accused the rights group of downplaying the scale of the destruction Israel left behind.
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Amnesty - which first accused Israel of war crimes shortly after the fighting ended on January 18 - said "disturbing questions" remained about why high-precision weapons like tank shells and air-delivered bombs and missiles "killed so many children and other civilians".
The group deplored Israel's use of less-precise artillery shells and highly incendiary white phosphorous in built-up areas. It also accused Israeli forces of using Palestinians as "human shields" and frequently blocking civilians from receiving medical care and humanitarian aid.
The pattern of Israeli attacks and the high number of civilian casualties "showed elements of reckless conduct, disregard for civilian lives and property and a consistent failure to distinguish between military targets and civilians and civilian objects", Amnesty International charged.
More than 1 400 Palestinians, including more than 900 civilians, were killed during the three-week offensive, according to Gaza health officials and human rights groups.
Israel, which launched the war to halt years of rocket and mortar attacks on its southern communities, puts the death toll closer to 1 100. It says the vast majority of the dead were militants.
Amnesty says about 300 children and hundreds of other unarmed civilians were among the dead.
Thirteen Israelis also died, including three civilians who were killed by rocket fire.
The Israeli military rejected the report's findings, saying it did not properly recognise "the unbearable reality of nine years of incessant and indiscriminate rocket fire on the citizens of Israel".
The report, the military added, ignored the military's efforts to minimise civilian casualties in a battlefield where Hamas used residential areas, medical facilities, schools and mosques as cover to stage attacks.
Israel did not respond to Amnesty's repeated requests for information on specific cases detailed in the report and for meetings to discuss the organisation's findings, said Donatella Rovera, who headed Amnesty's field research mission.
The 117-page Amnesty report also denounced Hamas for firing rockets into Israel.
"Such unlawful attacks constitute war crimes and are unacceptable," Rovera said.
Hamas denounced the report at a news conference yesterday. "The report equated the victim and the executioner and denied our people's right to resist the occupation," said spokesman Fawzi Barhoum.
"The report ignores the scale of destruction and serious crimes committed by the occupation in Gaza … and provides a misleading description in order to reduce the magnitude of the Israeli crimes."
Earlier, Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of Hamas's Gaza government, said his bloc believed "the leaders of the occupation state must be tried for these crimes". He ignored Amnesty's criticism of the militants' conduct.
The UN is examining the conduct of both sides to the conflict.
Hamas allowed veteran war crimes investigator Judge Richard Goldstone, of South Africa, and his team into Gaza last month, but Hamas security often accompanied them.
This raised questions about the ability of witnesses to freely describe the militant group's actions. Israel has refused to co-operate with the investigation, claiming the UN council overseeing the investigation is biased.
- This article was originally published on page 4 of The Star on July 03, 2009
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