Category: War crimes

Changing the rules of war

An excellent article by George Bisharat, Professor of Law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, on the possibly disastrous implications of Israel’s latest attack on Gaza for international law. Israel has long sought to frame its actions as falling under the legal doctrines of ‘armed conflict’ instead of ones governed by the laws of occupation – the former permitting far greater uses of force. Bisharat warns that “this shift, if accepted, would encourage occupiers to follow Israel’s lead, externalizing military control while shedding all responsibilities to occupied populations.”

The extent of Israel’s brutality against Palestinian civilians in its 22-day pounding of the Gaza Strip is gradually surfacing. Israeli soldiers are testifying to lax rules of engagement tantamount to a license to kill. One soldier commented: “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him.”

What is less appreciated is how Israel is also brutalizing international law, in ways that may long outlast the demolition of Gaza.

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Focus on Gaza – White Phosphorous

In this week’s show we hear how Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of war crimes for it’s unlawful use of white phosphorous. Mike Kirsch a town in the US where white phosphorous is manufactured and shows locals the true human cost of the weapon.

Survivors of the war in Gaza take legal action and we meet a mother burnt by white phosphorous who tells her story.

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Fake faith and epic crimes

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes a worldwide movement that is ‘challenging the once-sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives and retain an immunity from justice’. In Tony Blair’s case, justice inches closer.

These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves”.

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Kafka Era Double Standard

Edward S. Herman’s article published in Zmag on Israel-Palestine, the ‘right to self-defense’ and the double standards to which the crimes of official allies and enemies are held.

The U.S. political class and those of the EU and the new “hope” and “change” leader of the United States, Barack Obama, justify Israel’s attack on Gaza as based on its “right of self-defense.” There is, of course, the question of whether it is acceptable to defend yourself by a massive attack on a civilian population when this is not the only route to self defense—the Israelis could withdraw from an illegal occupation, they could stop starving the Gaza population, and they could abide by negotiated ceasefires (in this case, effectively and almost surely deliberately ended by their November 6 killing of six Gaza Palestinians). There is also the problem that the Israeli action violated the UN Charter. Article 51, the self-defense exception, requires immediate notification of the Security Council and, after any immediate attack is contained, giving over remedial action to the Security Council. There is also the problem that this “self-defense” operation was planned six months in advance and is widely believed in Israel to be linked to Israeli politics, with the two ruling parties seeking an improved standing—which they achieved—by military action.

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Campaign Against the Guardian

guardian230309Following the Guardian’s excellent feature Gaza War Crimes Investigation the Zionist Federation and Israeli Embassy have coordinated a disingenuous campaign against the paper.  The same story has also been picked up by ‘Honest’ Reporting and pro-Israel writers such as Melanie Philips whose article in the Spectator is embarrassingly titled The Guardian goes to Pallywood (I’m really surprised this clown gets her work published).

It’s worth remembering that the brutal assault on Gaza is a greater crime than any of the war crimes contained within it.  Noam Chomsky explains that “it is […] a mistake to concentrate too much on Israel’s gross violations of jus in bello, the laws designed to bar practices that are too savage. The invasion itself is a far more serious crime.” 

UN envoy, and expert on international law, Richard Falk agrees, describing the attack on Gaza as a war crime of the “greatest magnitude” stating it had no legal justification and may represent a “crime against peace”.  This is because Israel had not employed all peaceful options and ignored Hamas’s calls for a ceasefire based on an easing of the siege.  The siege is also an attack against the people of Gaza, a collective punishment that breaches Geneva conventions.  Clearly Israel’s action most certainly were not defensive; given Israel’s illegal occupation and colonisation of Palestinian lands, it can only be seen as part of an ongoing aggressive policy. Continue reading “Campaign Against the Guardian”

HRW: Israel accused of indiscriminate phosphorus use in Gaza

White Phosphorus
Palestinian civilians and medics run to safety during an Israeli strike using phosphorus shells at a UN school. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP

Human Rights Watch has released a new detailed report charging the Israeli government with committing numerous and repeated grave violations of the laws of war. The report entitled ‘Rain of Fire’ focuses on the illegal use of white phosphorus in Gaza and is only the latest in a growing series of evidence documenting Israeli war crimes. Additionaly, HRW “found no evidence that Hamas fighters used Palestinian civilians as human shields – a key Israeli claim – in the area at the time of the attacks it researched.” Here is the Guardian’s brief summary of HRW’s main findings:

Israel’s military fired white phosphorus over crowded areas of Gaza repeatedly and indiscriminately in its three-week war, killing and injuring civilians and committing war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today.

In a 71-page report, the rights group said the repeated use of air-burst white phosphorus artillery shells in populated areas of Gaza was not incidental or accidental, but revealed “a pattern or policy of conduct”.

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Gaza war crimes investigation: Israeli drones

Clancy Chassay asks why Israeli drones with optics capable of seeing the colour of a target’s clothes killed so many Palestinian civilians during the recent Gaza invasion. Part Three of Three. Watch Part One and Part Two.

Mounir al-Jarah slowly takes down the bricks he used to wall up the entrance to his sister’s courtyard. Inside, flesh still clings to the walls; blood-soaked furniture and family items lie broken and mangled.

Mounir’s eyes search around the old house as he recounts the events of 16 January, when a rocket fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle killed his sister, her husband and four of her children.

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Gaza war crimes investigation: Attacks on medics

Clancy Chassay asks why 16 medical workers were killed and more than half of Gaza’s hospitals were hit during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Part Two of Three. Watch Part One and Part Three.

Medical staff and ambulance drivers who attempted to assist casualties of the Israeli invasion of Gaza have told the Guardian that they were attacked by Israeli forces while trying to carry out their job.

The offensive left 16 medics dead. Nearly all of them were killed by Israeli fire while trying to save lives, and many more were wounded. According to the World Health Organisation, more than half of Gaza’s 27 hospitals were damaged by Israeli bombs. Two clinics were completely destroyed and 44 others received damage.

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Gaza war crimes investigation: human shields

Clancy Chassay investigates claims from three brothers that the Israeli military used them as human shields during the invasion of Gaza. Part One of Three. Watch Part Two and Part Three.

Israel has been accused of using Palestinian human shields during its invasion of Gaza, a breach of the Geneva conventions that prohibit intentionally putting civilian lives at risk.The Guardian has interviewed three Gazan brothers who described how they were taken from their home at gunpoint, made to kneel in front of tanks to deter Hamas fighters from firing and sent by Israeli soldiers into Palestinian houses to clear them.

“They would make us go first, so if any fighters shot at them the bullets would hit us, not them,” said 14-year-old Al’a al-Attar.

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To free Iraq, resistance must bridge the sectarian divide

‘As anti-occupation leaders recognise, the US could still exploit their divisions in an effort to offset its strategic defeat’, writes Seumas Milne.

In a last-ditch attempt to rescue some wafer of credibility from the west’s most catastrophic war of modern times, the story is taking hold in Britain and the US that after six years of horror Iraq is finally coming good. So quickly has this spin become accepted truth that politicians and pundits now regularly insist that if only General Petraeus is allowed to work his surge magic on Afghanistan, all could be well in that benighted land as well. One recent report in the Sunday Telegraph even claimed that the 4,000 British troops still in Basra are regarded as “heroes and liberators” by Iraqis now that their £8bn mission has at last been “accomplished”.

As the seventh year of the US-led occupation of Iraq begins tomorrow, facts on the ground tell a very different tale. Last week more than 60 people were killed in two suicide attacks on Iraqi police and army targets in Baghdad, while on Monday a 12-year-old girl was shot dead by American troops in a checkpoint incident in Nineveh province. It’s true that violence is well down on its gory peak of a couple of years ago and the power supply is edging up – to the level the US promised to achieve five years ago, at about 50% of demand. But a US soldier is killed on average every other day, Iraqi police and soldiers are dying at a much higher rate, and reported Iraqi civilian deaths are running at over 300 a month.

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