Amnesty: attack to save soldier was ‘war crime’

ISRAEL COMMITTED war crimes with the “relentless and massive bombardment” of residential areas of Gaza that followed the capture of an Israeli soldier a year ago, a new Amnesty International report has claimed.

The attacks came after Hamas captured 23-year-old Lieutenant Hadar Goldin. In an attempt to prevent his capture, the IDF activated the Hannibal Directive — a planned response to a possible kidnap — and launched a bombardment of Rafah.

Published on Wednesday, the Amnesty report — ‘Black Friday’: Carnage in Rafah during 2014 Israel/Gaza conflict — claimed 135 Palestinian civilians were killed, including 75 children, following the August 1 incident last year.

Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East programme director, said: “There is strong evidence that Israeli forces committed war crimes in their relentless and massive bombardment of residential areas of Rafah in order to foil the capture, displaying a shocking dis- regard for civilian lives. They carried out a series of disproportionate or otherwise indiscriminate attacks, which they have completely failed to investigate independently.”

Mr Luther said Israeli forces appeared to have “thrown out the rule book, employing a ‘gloves off’ policy with devastating consequences”.

The continuation of bombing raids after Lt Goldin’s death was confirmed on August 2 suggested the IDF “may in part have been motivated by a desire to punish the population of Rafah as revenge”, he added. Working with academics from Forensic Architecture, a research team based at Goldsmiths, University of London, Amnesty said that it had assessed hundreds of satellite images and videos and compared them to eyewitness accounts.

A spokesman at the Israeli embassy in London said the report was “fundamentally flawed in its methodologies, in its facts, in its legal analysis and in its conclusions”.

‘IDF threw out the rule book during the operation’