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Israel violated international law according to a report released Thursday that investigated the use of human shields during Israel's 2014 onslaught of the Gaza Strip.
The report, published by the Geneva-based Euro-Mid human rights observer, says that the Israeli army broke international law on at least six occasions in the southern Gaza Strip in August.
Civilians were subjected to "inhumane and abusive" treatment, according to the report entitled, "Israeli Matrix of Control: use of Palestinian civilians as human shields."
Palestinians were beaten and exposed to the hot sun while naked for long periods of time, investigators found.
The human rights organization claims that testimonies collected by its observers show that the use of Palestinian human shields is a recurring Israeli policy since there have been similar cases outside of Gaza, such as in the West Bank.
Jessica Purkiss from the Middle East Monitor, told Anadolu Agency on Thursday that the cases of human shields were "horrific."
Purkiss referenced the case of Ramadan Qdeih from Khan Younis, where he told observers that he saw his father shot dead and was made to stand at the windows with his hands tied while Israeli soldiers stood behind him, shooting.
"It's complete injustice, it's treating people absolutely like animals, and I think it's symbolic of how the Israeli military see Palestinians," said Purkiss.
The Euro-Mid team also said that they did not find any evidence of Palestinians who were forced to stay in their homes or to use their bodies for the protection of Palestinian fighters.
The report calls on Israeli military prosecutors to carry out a "serious and reliable" investigation of the cases documented in the report and asks for the individuals that are found guilty to be held to account.
Euro-Mid also called on the United Nations Human Rights Council to establish a fact-finding mission into the recent conflict and to investigate the issue of human shields.
Ihsan Adel, a legal advisor working at Euro-Mid, told Anadolu Agency that they will give the evidence that they have gathered to the UN in the hope that those who committed crimes would face trial.
Adel said that both Palestinians and Israelis should join the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court and an investigation should be launched into war crimes committed during the war on Gaza.
In a separate report released Thursday by the same organization, it was claimed that the Israeli military deliberately carried out indiscriminate attacks on the Gaza Strip.
The observers based their claims on the testimonies of 432 people and again urged a UN investigation.
Euro-Mid said that "reconstruction of the Gaza Strip is needed for Palestinians... However without accountability for crimes and protection for human rights; it will be a life without dignity or hope."
The report concludes that Israel violated Article 16 of the fourth Geneva Convention that obliges parties to protect people with special needs such as those with disabilities.
"By bombing a Palestinian charity and other institutions housing disabled people without effective warning, Israeli forces violated its obligations under the fourth Geneva Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities," the report said.
Israel has denied all charges that it has acted outside of international law and has instead accused Hamas of using human shields.
During Israel's onslaught this summer, over 15,000 housing units were damaged across the Gaza Strip, including 2,200 that were totally destroyed, according to official Palestinian figures.
More than 2,160 Gazans were killed and 11,000 injured, mostly civilians, during seven weeks of unrelenting Israeli bombardment - from air, land and sea - throughout July and August.
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By Sara Roy, Harvard University
In the near three decades that I have been involved with Gaza and her people, I have never seen the kind of physical and psychological destruction that I see there today.
In all Gaza’s long and tormented history, there is no precedent for its extraordinarily dangerous position in 2014. The situation is dangerous not only for Gazans, but for Israelis as well; as the scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu recently wrote: “If there is ever to be Israeli-Palestinian peace – with all other options having been exhausted – Gaza will be the foundation, and the keystone.”
This is because Gaza has long been, and remains, the heart of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to Israeli occupation. The war in the summer of 2014 was not about rocket fire, Israeli security or Hamas: it was about subduing and disabling Gaza, something Israel has consistently been trying to do ever since it occupied the territory together with the West Bank nearly 50 years ago.
Israel’s principal strategy has long been to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state by dividing and separating Palestinians, particularly via the annexation of the West Bank. But complete control over the West Bank – the obvious goal of the settlement enterprise and the separation barrier – cannot be achieved as long as Gaza remains a source of resistance and as long as the possibility of a unified Palestinian state exists (which came a step closer last June with the formal announcement of a Palestinian unity government, the proximate cause of the war on Gaza).
Dynamic of disintegration
The separation and isolation of Gaza from the West Bank was a goal of the 1993 Oslo process – and had the direct and sustained support of the US, the EU, and the Palestinian leadership. It has not only precluded the development of a unified political system but has also eliminated the geographic basis of a Palestinian economy, making the creation of a viable Palestinian state a virtual impossibility.
This is the status quo, institutionalised over the past 21 years of “peacemaking”, that Israel must preserve. And this is the context in which the large-scale destruction of Gaza’s civilian life last summer must be understood.
Ultimately, Operation Protective Edge was designed to set in motion what one of my colleagues recently called a “dynamic of disintegration”. That disintegration has taken a number of forms, some of them completely unprecedented.
A whole indigenous economy has been all but destroyed, with extensive damage to civilian infrastructure; Gazan society has been reduced to almost complete aid dependence. It has also been radically economically levelled, with the virtual destruction of its middle class and the emergence of a broad new class of “poor”.
Gaza’s social fabric has greatly weakened, and is now characterised by a new kind of fragility and disempowerment; entire neighbourhoods have been eliminated, and their community life destroyed. Emigration is rising fast, and hope for peace with Israel is being abandoned, to a degree never seen before.
Getting on with it
Despite the size and urgency of the task at hand, efforts to “reconstruct” or “rebuild” of Gaza have long been deeply problematic.
Although billions of dollars have been pledged by donors, reconstruction is always planned or implemented within an unchanged (and unchallenged) political framework of continued Israeli occupation, assault and blockade. Meanwhile, Gaza’s subjection to Israeli military attacks and economic sanction is at best ignored and at worst endorsed by key forces in the West, notably the US and EU.
But the current attempt at reconstruction is a new low.
On with the reconstruction – whatever that means.
EPA/Oliver Weiken
Never mind that Gaza’s recent devastation, met largely with laissez-faire silence from Western states, is completely unprecedented; the agreed-upon plan for addressing the situation clearly prioritises limited short-term gain at the cost of a long-term entrenchment of Israel’s destructive blockade.
As one donor official put it to me: “If we can get cement and other construction materials into Gaza, it’s a win.” Another admitted: “Donors backed the plan before they had even seen it.”
There are now several published documents describing the reconstruction and recovery plan for Gaza – but the most damning one, the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, has not been published (at least to my knowledge), and it is unlikely that it ever will be. Another key document, the Materials Monitoring Unit Project, Project Initiation Document (UNOPS), is available, but has not been widely distributed outside the donor community.
I have seen both documents, the latter in its entirety. They read more like security plans, carefully laying out Israeli concerns and the ways in which the United Nations will accommodate them. They do not speak to the comprehensive recovery of the Gaza Strip.
The reconstruction plan they detail has so many problems that in my view, it is clearly doomed to fail.
Bad priorities
The plan calls for a cumbersome administrative and bureaucratic apparatus for project selection and implementation that transfers risk to Palestinian beneficiaries/suppliers and totally ignores the power asymmetries and security realities that will undeniably affect outcomes.
In fact, what is being created is a permanent and complex permit and planning system similar to the one Israel uses in Area C of the West Bank, which is under total Israeli control. This system will be difficult if not impossible to implement, and as structured, any implementation failure will be blamed on the Palestinians.
Israel will have to approve all projects and their locations and will be able to veto any part of the process on security grounds.
There is no mention of reviving Gaza’s export trade or private sector development (other than in relation to specific private-sector companies vetted by the PA and Israel for individually approved projects). Both are essential for rehabilitating Gaza’s moribund economy. Similarly, there is no reference to the free movement of people, another urgent need.
No mechanism for accountability or transparency will apply to Israel. Nor will there be any mechanism for resolving disputes, which can only be decided through consensus: the occupier must agree with the occupied.
The plan mainly serves to legitimise Israel’s preferred security narrative. According to the UNOPS document, the outcome of the reconstruction project must be “the establishment of an intermediate system of dual-use items monitoring that will facilitate the import approval of construction materials and machinery into Gaza. This will be achieved through the reduction of [Israeli] security concerns of materials being diverted for use in the enhancement of military capabilities and terrorist capacities”.
Meanwhile, not only will the blockade of Gaza be strengthened, but responsibility for maintaining the blockade is in effect being transferred to the UN, which is tasked with monitoring the entire process. As a colleague working as an analyst in Jerusalem so succinctly put it: “Israel retains the power, the UN assumes the responsibility and the Palestinians bear the risk.”
The document also makes it clear that the donors are the singular funding source for Gaza’s reconstruction; Israel assumes no financial responsibility. The UNOPS document has only this to say about the Israeli role: “The [government of Israel] plays no operational role other than approvals and as recipient of the monitoring reports. As such consultation and approval will be required in the development of the report templates.”
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the plan is successfully implemented, its intended outcome is still completely unclear. It does nothing to explain what kind of economy is supposed to be enabled, or what exactly is being rebuilt. Is it what was lost in 2000, 2006, 2007, 2008-09, 2012 or 2014? Is it people’s lives and livelihoods?
Beyond bricks
After all, reconstruction is not simply about buildings and public works: it’s about securing a real future, and creating a sense of place, possibility and security. Life in Gaza cannot be rebuilt with cement and cash handouts.
Of course, people desperately need assistance. What is at issue is the terms on which that assistance will be provided, and what political ends it will serve. Gaza does not just need aid; it needs freedom and the right to interact normally with the world. Anything short of this is unsustainable.
More than 20 years after the so-called peace process began, the donor community funding the rebuilding effort still has big questions to answer. In the absence of a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is shocking that the occupation and continued dispossession of more than 4m Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank continues to be tolerated by the West.
Equally, the blockade, the unravelling of Gaza’s economy and the widening impoverishment of 1.75m people in the Gaza Strip (a great many of them children) are met not with outrage, but with support from Western governments.
The truth is that as long as humanitarian aid is used to address political problems, all “reconstruction” will mean for Gaza is continued ruination.
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On 18 October 2014, a self-professed "racist" pro-Israel counter-protester at a Block the Boat action in Los Angeles told black Palestinian solidarity activist and radio personality Margaret Prescod to “take your Ebola a*s and get out.” The racism of these California-based Zionist counter-protesters is symptomatic of a much larger culture of bigotry and hate in Israel and among some pro-Israel supporters internationally.
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SodaStream stock is still in free fall and the company announced yesterday that it is dumping its apartheid digs in the occupied West Bank. SodaStream says it plans to move to the heavily subsidized Idan HaNegev Industrial Park /Lehavim Industrial zone, 1,100-acre "development zone" in the Negev desert where Palestinian Bedouins are being forcibly removed by the Israeli government. One thing is clear from yesterday's coverage, SodaStream's brand has been thoroughly saturated by BDS.
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A right-wing Israeli member of parliament has proposed legislation that would ban the Muslim call to prayer in Israel, where 20 percent of the population is Arab (the majority of whom are Muslim). Robert Ilatov, a MP from the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, argued for restricting the ability of mosques to project the 'Adhan," or call to prayer, which are sung out usually by a local muezzin five times a day.
The song of the muezzin is a fixture of urban life in many parts of the world where there are Muslim populations. But for Ilatov and others, it's a problem of noise pollution. The proposed bill would give Israeli authorities the right to decide whether public address systems can be placed in mosques -- a de facto right to muffle the muezzin.
"Hundreds of thousands of citizens in Israel, in the Galilee, the Negev, Jerusalem and other locations in central Israel suffer on a regular basis from noise that is caused by muezzin calls in mosques," reads the proposed bill, according to the Daily Telegraph.
This is not the first time Ilatov's party has proposed this measure. In 2011, another Yisrael Beitenu member proposed a similar bill. It was backed by the party's leader Avigdor Lieberman, who is currently Israel's foreign minister, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The move foundered after officials decided it was too divisive a measure.
"This is simply a march of folly," said then Israeli President Shimon Peres. "I am personally ashamed there are attempts being made to pass such laws."
The bill's revival is perhaps emblematic of the adversarial mood in Israel, with Netanyahu's government controversially expanding settlements into East Jerusalem and fears of mounting tensions between Palestinians and Orthodox Jews in the ancient city.
Ilatov's proposal is also evidence of what many critics claim is a climate of deepening racism toward Palestinians, fostered by ascendant right-wing forces in the country. Writing in the New York Times, Rula Jebreal, an outspoken Palestinian Israeli commentator, wrote of the increasing hardships for Arab minorities within the Israeli State:
Israel is increasingly becoming a project of ethno-religious purity and exclusion. Religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox parties occupy 30 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, and the coalition government includes members of Jewish Home, a religious Zionist party, and Yisrael Beiteinu, a right-wing nationalist party. Central to their politics is a program of discriminatory legislation, designed to curtail the civil rights of Palestinian Israeli citizens.
Ilatov seems undeterred, though it's unclear whether the bill will get much further this time. "Freedom of religion and worship is a universal freedom to which everyone is entitled in every democratic state, and of course in Israel," he told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. "This does not mean that additional rights can be trampled, such as the right to conduct a normal daily routine that includes peaceful and uninterrupted sleep during the night."
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SodaStream International Ltd. will close a factory in a West Bank settlement that had prompted calls by pro-Palestinian activists for consumers to boycott the Israeli company’s soda machines.
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Right wingers? Left wingers? Fence sitters? Hebrew U. researchers parsed the data.
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People living along Gaza border ordered to evacuate as army plans to destroy their homes and create a buffer zone.
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Quotes from senior Obama administration figures damn Israeli prime minister over stance on settlements and Palestinian peace
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Last year, Israeli settlers destroyed or damaged nearly 11,000 Palestinian- owned trees, the U.N. reported.
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A new documentary whitewashes the U.S. Ambassador to the UN's record of covering for some of the worst human rights abusers.
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MTKL’s Israeli Army Women Calendar
Just a couple of months after the Gaza war, Israel has found a new way “to show the world the beauty of Israel and its people” — via the power of a pin-up calendar featuring real IDF soldiers.
Or, as the creators of the MTKL Israeli Army Women Calendar like to call them, “the chosen amongst the chosen people.”
These chosen women, brought together by two former (male) soldiers who “scoured the ranks of the powerful Israeli army,” would like you to donate $25 to their Indiegogo campaign so that they can not only ship you this calendar, but also create a whole line of clothing and accessories that will blend “the best of military and street into must-have urban fashion.”
MTKL
Their goal is to make $30,000 off the calendars, enabling them to bring their clothing line to production in early 2015. So far they’ve raised about $3700 — which means that a bunch of people are already walking around wearing jewelry “fashioned after the official IDF Dog Tag.”
Scary thought.
I say that because, if you ask me, this fashion line — and the pin-up calendar being used to showcase it — is pretty much the most unsexy thing I can imagine.
It’s not just that this product is the work of two men using a bunch of women’s bodies to make a quick buck. Leave aside for a minute the obvious feminist objections to pin-up calendars writ large — and hone in on this calendar in particular. It doesn’t take long to see that we’re being sold more than your average “male gaze” sexual fantasy. What we’re being sold is an ideology that equates sexiness with militarism, and Israel with both.
There are at least 4 deeply unfortunate things about this:
1) It shows that Israel’s macho culture — a culture that says military violence is a beautiful and even arousing thing — is alive and well.
2) Women are supposed to be grateful to be allowed into this macho culture. The fact that they’re included is a sign of the culture’s progressiveness, of how evolved and “egalitarian” it is (to quote MTKL’s campaign).
3) Plenty of women actually buy into this logic. That includes the international buyers of MTKL’s products (sadly, I have no doubt that their products will sell) and the Israeli models themselves.
4) By buying into this logic, they are — wittingly or unwittingly — working to put a sexy face on the occupation.
But the occupation isn’t sexy.
The Gaza war, just recently ended, wasn’t sexy.
And so seeing these women’s limbs draped in ammunition belts, their faces smeared in war paint and their bodies surrounded with guns and knives — it doesn’t feel sexy.
The MTKL designers may think their calendar will help “to show the world the beauty of Israel and its people” — but I suspect that for an increasing number of people, this insistence on associating Israel with militarism actually does the exact opposite.
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CNN asked marketing experts for their advice how a hate group can improve its image.
My deepest, heartfelt sympathies for every single Black person, Jew, and LGBTQ person who works with CNN in any capacity. This includes the janitor, the window washer, the front desk receptionist, and the UPS person.
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Celebrate Your Fully Operational Relationship With These Star Wars Rings
TIE the knot or else they might end up becoming your X.
Artist: Paul Michael Design
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99.9% of the time people say, "I hate to say it," whatever they say after they actually really love to say.
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