Fury over claims of ‘crimes’ by Israel in air strikes
CLAIMS BY an international human rights organisation that Israel may have committed war crimes in Gaza earlier this year have been condmened as “practically indistinguishable from Hamas propaganda”.
The new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) focused in particular on air strikes to destroy buildings believed to be used by Palestinian armed groups targeting civilians in Israel during the conflict in May.
The NGO says it found “no evidence”that Palestinians involved in military operations were in the tower blocks in Gaza City or had a long-term presence there.
The report alleges the fighting took place in a context of the Israeli government’s “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution”, claiming that Israel “provided no evidence” that Hamas and other groups used civilians as human shields.
The report does accept that “no deaths or injuries of fighters or civilians were reported” as a result of strikes on the four buildings, and credits the Israeli military’s practice of warning tenants of impending attacks, allowing for their evacuation.
It also cites a Palestinian business owner in one building saying “there were Hamas offices in the tower”.
The report quotes an unnamed journalist as saying that Hamas had “political meeting offices” in one of the buildings, but says this did not make it a legitimate target.
HRW, which has previously been accused of having an anti-Israel agenda, conducted phone interviews with 18 Palestinians who it says were “witnesses and victims” of the strikes during Operation Guardian of the Walls.
The organisation also says video footage and photographs taken after the strikes were assessed, as well as statements by
Israeli and Palestinian officials and “Palestinian armed groups”.
Jerusalem-based watchdog NGO Monitor has condemned the report and questioned its methodology. Director of communications Itai Reuveni said: “The 18 people HRW spoke to are unlikely to have been able to speak openly about Hamas without fear for their own safety and lives, so relying on them to testify whether certain targets were used by Hamas terrorists is not really credible.” NGO Monitor’s Legal Advisor, Anne Herzberg, accused HRW of ignoring “extensive photographic and documentary evidence wholly refuting their claims”, declaring that the New York advocacy organisation’s work is “practically indistinguishable from propaganda issued from Hamas itself”.
The IDF maintains that the four towers were valid military targets and that its strikes on them involved significant advanced warnings that avoided any civilian deaths.
An IDF spokesman defended the bombings, explaining that “in some cases, the IDF had to destroy the entire target, such as when striking a particular floor would likely lead to the building’s uncontrolled collapse, endangering civilians and nearby buildings as well, or when the destruction of the entire target was required to achieve the operational goal.”
The IDF suggests this happened only in a “handful of cases”.
While HRW says it was not given evidence by Israeli authorities of their intelligence or legal deliberations, the IDF insists that soldiers used “accurate multi-source intelligence” to identify these targets.
The four towers mentioned were “of particularly high military value”, according to the IDF spokesperson, with some hosting complex technical equipment designed to interfere with Israel’s Iron Dome defence system.
In a televised speech following the fighting in May, Hamas’ Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar admitted that several of the terrorist organisation’s military headquarters were embedded in residential buildings. Promising to address the “huge problem” of basing military headquarters “in civilian areas”, Sinwar said they were moving them “from towers, residential buildings and other places”.
Col Richard Kemp, former British Commander of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, called the report a “predictable attempt by HRW to defame Israel and to distort Israel’s military actions”, which “very clearly does not reflect reality”. The report, published on Monday, claimed some of Israel’s recent military strikes in the Gaza strip may be war crimes, and “apparently violated the laws of war”.
Col Kemp, however, described the Israeli military actions as setting the “gold standard” for such engagements, saying: “I would challenge any army in the world to achieve anything like that standard. I would say it would be impossible for any other army.”