We were all outraged during Israel’s latest incursion into Gaza at the extreme number of civilian casualties. The IDF claimed that it observed high standards during the operations, yet, more than two thirds of those killed were civilians. A recent report states that a total of 1,434 persons were killed during the 22-day offensive, including 960 civilians, 239 police officers and 235 fighters.
However, [a]n Israeli military spokesman said the army had “made every effort to minimise harm to the civilian population” during the fighting.
But Haaretz is making an expose this week that shows a very different reality.
Follow below::
There is no need to add much comment, the testimony brought forward by these soldiers is compelling enough:
During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive.
The soldiers are graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Tivon. Some of their statements made on Feb. 13 will appear Thursday and Friday in Haaretz. Dozens of graduates of the course who took part in the discussion fought in the Gaza operation.
The speakers included combat pilots and infantry soldiers. Their testimony runs counter to the Israel Defense Forces’ claims that Israeli troops observed a high level of moral behavior during the operation.
[…]
“The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn’t understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he … he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders.”
According to the squad leader: “The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them.
“I don’t think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to … I don’t know how to describe it …. The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way,” he said.
Another squad leader from the same brigade told of an incident where the company commander ordered that an elderly Palestinian woman be shot and killed; she was walking on a road about 100 meters from a house the company had commandeered.
[…]
The above quote was from yesterday’s issue. There is plenty more today in the following articles – and more to follow tomorrow:
ANALYSIS / Can Israel dismiss its own troops’ stories from Gaza?
IDF orders probe into allegations over Gaza war
In the wake of an Haaretz expose, the Israel Defense Forces on Thursday ordered an investigation into soldiers’ accounts of alleged misconduct and serious violations of the army’s rules of engagement.
Military Advocate General Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit instructed the Military Police Investigation unit to launch the probe after soldiers were quoted as telling a military cadet academy that combat troops in Gaza fired at unarmed Palestinian civilians and vandalized property during Operation Cast Lead.
OK – all will be fine now. An internal investigation…
If Israel wants to be perceived as a nation of laws, it might be better to have an independent body do the investigations, as called for 2 months ago by Richard Falk:
GENEVA — There is evidence that Israel committed war crimes during its 22-day campaign in the Gaza Strip and there should be an independent inquiry, U.N. investigator Richard Falk said on Thursday.
The mental anguish of the civilians who suffered the assault is so great that the entire population of Gaza could be seen as casualties, said Falk, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Falk, speaking by phone from his home in California, said compelling evidence that Israel’s actions in Gaza violated international humanitarian law required an independent investigation into whether they amounted to war crimes.
But an independent inquiry is highly unlikely. My prediction; no one will be held accountable, with the possible exception of a low-rank soldier, or two.
I took my chances and cross posted this on Daily Kos.
some ardent Israeli supporters over there.
No doubt!
A lot of comments in a thread are hidden, since the first comment in it was ugly. I cannot really follow that part anymore, as it’s years since I was a TU over there.
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My recent comment settles willful intent …
(Haaretz) – The international law division headed by Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch gave the go-ahead. In spite of doubts, and also under pressure, Sharvit-Baruch and the division also legitimized the attack on Hamas government buildings and the relaxing of the rules of engagement, resulting in numerous Palestinian casualties. In the division it is also believed that the killing of civilians in a house whose residents the IDF has warned might be considered legally justified, although the IDF does not actually target civilians in this way.
The legal addendum to Operation Cast Lead’s order shows the way the IDF’s legal experts legitimized the army’s actions: “As much as possible and under the circumstances of the matter, the civilian population in a target area is to be warned,” it states, adding “unless so doing endangers the operation or the forces.”
The addendum orders commanders to be extremely cautious in the use of “incendiary weapons” (for example, phosphorus bombs), but does not prohibit their use: “Before using these weapons, the the military advocate general or international law division must be consulted on the specific case.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The most disgusting aspect of the massacre is that Israel, namely, Barak, justified it on the basis of rocketry into southern Israeli cities, Sderot and Askelon. Yet, as continually reported in the Middle East and European press, those rocket attacks were consistently in response to IDF incursions into the territories to kill alleged militants. In short, they were retaliatory. But Israel would not stop them. ON over a half dozen occasions, Hamas proposed a ceasefire, but Israel refused on the rediculous notion that Hamas would rearm in the interim, as if that wasn’t already happening during active periods. As Jimmy Carter reported, Hamas underwent voluntary ceasefires twice for a month each time, to no avail. IDF kept up the incursive killings. When Egypt finally negotiated a ceasefire that Israel accepted, it lasted for four months, even though other militant groups did fire a few rockets each month and morters, apparently at IDF positions. Israel embassy data confirmed those facts and it was even publically announced by Regev, an Israeli official. On Nov 5, two months before the Israeli election, Barak broke the ceasefire, entered Gaza and killed 6 Hamas militants. The Hamas rockets resumed, giving the government the pretext to attack Gaza.
Am I stupid or was this simply a preelection stunt, which cost over 1,400 Palestinian lives. Sad to say, it appears that the Israeli public bought into it all, hook, line, and sinker.
So the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors have been reduced to justify their atrocities by saying they were following orders and therefore “didn’t feel too bad about it”.
What was it that Nietzsche said about the danger of battling monsters?
Oh yeah, that.
Eichman gave that excuse at his trial in Israel before he was hanged: just following orders.
The only thing that is new about any of this is that it is suddenly being widely publicized. The Israeli military has been doing things like this since the State was created in May, 1948, and the Zionists did things like this before that.
Finally, after all these decades, the ugly myth of the “most moral army in the world” and “purity of arms” is being widely seen for the bull** it has always been.
And the claim that Israel does not target civilians is utter hogwash. Civilians are exactly what Israel targets. Targeting civilians is what collective punishment is all about.
I don’t think I’ve ever been under any such illusions about the history of the state of Israel. Every time one of their leaders has rambled on, a la Bush, about the evils of terrorism, I have only had one word for them:
Irgun.
The initial struggle for Israeli statehood was conducted largely through Jewish terrorism; now that their descendants are wealthy enough to afford regular armed forces, they bitch about Palestinian terrorism.
Now, mind you, the point I am arguing is not that some terrorism is okay and some isn’t, or that any terrorism is okay, for that matter. Terrorism is largely counterproductive, and arguably, a pacifist Palestinian resistance would have played a lot better to the west than savages like Arafat; one need only look to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi for examples of successful nonviolent resistance in the face of otherwise invincible military opposition.
That said, oppressor states like Israel, the United States, Russia, and China often make silly noises about the futile terroristic resistances of the people they oppress, as if the impoverished resistance forces should just straighten up and field a regular army with tanks and helicopter gunships like decent folks do. The British Empire, I seem to recall, had similar complaints about the American irregulars whose tactics, if not quite descending to the level of terrorism most of the time, certainly were what we would call guerrilla tactics today. It’s an essentially dishonest complaint and should be dismissed out of hand.
The only people who believe that the IDF is the “most moral army in the world” are people who want to believe that in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They’re the same people who observe that every killing of a Palestinian noncombatant is accompanied by an official investigation into the incident by the IDF, but who also fail to observe that nothing ever comes of those investigations. Ever.
I don’t know, as a matter of official policy, overt or covert, that Israel targets civilians. The evidence plainly shows, however, that Israel is completely, carelessly indifferent to causing civilian casualties, and that moreover, the Israelis have come to consider any threat to their security, no matter how small, as a threat to their entire survival, and they use that exaggerated threat as a justification for using any countermeasure they feel like using, especially around election season.