Its been a whole year since the Israeli attack in Gaza, while Israeli threats remain to terrorize the civilians in Gaza, especially after the killing of 3 civilians in Gaza 2 days ago and another 3 in Nablus, the siege, which is the major problem for the 1.5 million people living in Gaza, the world remains silent against these continuous breaks of all human rights doctrons!
(Jerusalem, January 16, 2009) - Israel’s use of heavy artillery in residential areas of Gaza City violates the prohibition under the laws of war against indiscriminate attacks and should be stopped immediately, Human Rights Watch said today. A Human Rights Watch researcher on the Israel-Gaza border on January 15, 2009, observed Israel’s repeated use in the center of Gaza City of 155mm artillery shells, which inflict blast and fragmentation damage up to 300 meters away.
Israel uses heavy artilary directly on civilian buildings!
“Firing 155mm shells into the center of Gaza City, whatever the target, will likely cause horrific civilian casualties,” said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. “By using this weapon in such circumstances, Israel is committing indiscriminate attacks in violation of the laws of war.”
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Israel yesterday shelled the relief organization’s main compound in Gaza City, wounding three people. UNRWA believes that white phosphorus used in the attack set part of the compound on fire. Up to 700 city residents had fled there in the morning to seek refuge after intense fighting in the area. The Human Rights Watch researcher also witnessed ground-burst 155mm white phosphorus strikes in Gaza City.
“We warned the Israelis hour by hour through the night of the vulnerabilities here as the shells came closer and closer, and shrapnel was coming into the compound on a regular occasion,” John Ging, UNWRA’s Gaza director of operations, told the media. “Nonetheless, we have now been subjected to these direct hits.”
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apologized for the attack, but said Israeli forces had come under fire from the UN compound. “It is absolutely true that we were attacked from that place, but the consequences are very sad and we apologize for it,” he said.
The death toll from yesterday’s military operations remains unknown, but media reports quoted Gaza health officials as saying that 70 people had died (the reports make no distinction between civilian and combatant casualties). As of January 14, 1,013 Palestinians had died, including 322 children and 76 women, according to the Gazan Ministry of Health. An additional 4,560 Palestinians reportedly have been wounded, including 1,600 children and 678 women.
The attacks on Gaza City occurred after the Israel Defense Force (IDF) had warned Gaza’s residents to flee to city centers. According to the Israeli government, on January 3, the IDF began broadcasting warnings that told people, among other things, that “For your own safety, you are required to leave your homes immediately and move to the city centers.” Despite these warnings, the IDF has launched attacks against the Gaza city center, causing civilian casualties.
“Israel warned civilians to go to city centers and later shelled the center of Gaza City with a weapon that should never be used in densely populated areas,” Garlasco said.
According to media reports and aid groups, Israeli forces yesterday also fired upon a hospital and an international media center. The World Health Organization (WHO) told Human Rights Watch that Israeli shells had struck the al-Quds hospital in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood, setting it on fire. The fire was extinguished, but about 100 patients had to be evacuated. Between 150 and 500 patients were in the hospital at the time, WHO said.
Israeli fire also hit the al-Shurouq tower, which houses media outlets such as Reuters, al-Arabiyya Television, and al-Hayat newspaper, causing substantial damage and wounding at least two journalists, including one who worked for the Abu Dhabi television channel. Media organizations had provided the Israeli military with the GPS locations of all their offices. Israeli forces told the media that they had come under fire from the building. It is not clear if Israeli forces hit the building using artillery or tank shells.
Human Rights Watch is unable to conduct full investigations into alleged laws of war violations by either side because of Israel’s continuing denial of access to Gaza.
Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups have also violated the laws of war by continuing to fire unguided Qassam and Grad rockets at population centers in Israel. A Human Rights Watch researcher on the Gazan border yesterday saw the firing of a Qassam rocket that hit outside Sderot, causing no injuries. Such rockets have killed three Israeli civilians and injured at least 78 since December 27.
International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, prohibits indiscriminate attacks. Indiscriminate attacks are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction. Examples of indiscriminate attacks are those that are not directed at a specific military objective or that use weapons that cannot be directed at a specific military objective. Prohibited indiscriminate attacks include area bombardment, which are attacks by artillery or other means that treat as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in an area containing a concentration of civilians and civilian objects.
The expected lethal radius for a 155mm high explosive projectile, such as the artillery the IDF is currently using in Gaza City, is reportedly between 50 and 150 meters and the expected casualty radius is between 100 and 300 meters. IDF officials have previously said that the error radius for a 155mm shell is usually 25 meters. Therefore, if the IDF fires shells as close as 100 meters to populated areas, it greatly increases the likelihood of civilian casualties.
In Human Rights Watch’s June 2007 report “Indiscriminate Fire: Palestinian Rocket Attacks on Israel and Israeli Artillery Shelling in the Gaza Strip,” Human Rights Watch made the following recommendations to Israel concerning the use of artillery in densely populated areas of Gaza. Human Rights Watch called upon Israel to:
Source: Human Rights Watch
(Jerusalem) - Israel should immediately allow humanitarian groups broad access to Gaza and the evacuation of the wounded to alleviate the suffering of the civilian population, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Human Rights Watch also urged the UN secretary-general, who is to visit Israel on January 15, to take urgent steps to help alleviate the suffering of Gazan civilians.
Nineteen months of a highly restrictive blockade and two weeks of intense military operations have left Gazans in desperate need of food, water, electricity, and sanitation. Medical care is woefully inadequate to deal with the thousands wounded in the fighting. Civilians have nowhere to flee the aerial and ground attacks engulfing the territory.
“Israel and Egypt need to open their borders to allow a regular flow of food, medicine and fuel into Gaza, and to evacuate those needing urgent medical care,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “A daily three-hour humanitarian ‘pause’ is woefully insufficient to help all the wounded and supply Gaza’s civilian population, which has already endured severe deprivation for the past 19 months.”
According to the 27-page report, “Deprived and Endangered: Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip,” Gaza’s civilians are facing dire shortages of food, water, cooking gas, fuel and access to medical care. Human Rights Watch said that United Nations agencies have only been able to reach a small portion of those dependent on aid - which includes more than 80 percent of the population - since the Israeli offensive began on December 27, 2008. The electricity supply has slightly improved in recent days but remains low, and in some places open sewage is spilling into the streets. The ongoing fighting is preventing many families from leaving their homes to purchase food or obtain food aid. Children, who make up 56 percent of Gaza’s residents, are especially vulnerable.
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, as of January 12, Israeli attacks in Gaza had killed at least 910 Palestinians - both civilians and combatants - and wounded another 4,250. More than 292 children and 75 women are among the dead; more than 1,497 children and 626 women had been wounded. According to the UN, more than 40 percent of the dead and 50 percent of the wounded are women and children.
Israel has taken some positive steps in recent days, but the steps are vastly inadequate in relation to the magnitude of the crisis, Human Rights Watch said. Human Rights Watch called on the Israeli government to dramatically expand the humanitarian effort, with more trucks allowed into Gaza every day, more crossings opened, and greatly improved internal distribution within Gaza.
“Gaza was in the midst of a humanitarian crisis even before this fighting started due to Israel’s unlawful blockade, aided by Egypt’s cooperation in keeping its border with Gaza closed,” said Roth. “And now it is facing a catastrophe.”
The wounded are getting only rudimentary care from facilities that lack equipment, material and personnel. Hospitals have been running full-time on generators since December 30, when Gaza’s only power plant stopped functioning, and in some hospitals, generator fuel is running low. According to humanitarian agencies and medical officials, many patients are needlessly dying because of a lack of timely medical care. A key problem has been the inability to transfer seriously wounded persons out of Gaza. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, at least 413 wounded were in critical condition as of January 11.
Human Rights Watch released its report just prior to a visit in the region by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who will be in Israel on January 15. In a letter to the secretary-general, Human Rights Watch urged him to take urgent steps to help alleviate the suffering of Gazan civilians and to announce an international investigation into alleged violations of the laws of war by both Israel and Hamas.
An international investigation would be an important way of demonstrating that the United Nations is deeply concerned about the fate of victims of this conflict. Because Israel has blocked the media and human rights groups from entering Gaza, only an international investigation stands a chance at this critical moment of uncovering key facts and reducing abuses.
“The UN secretary-general’s visit is an opportunity to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the need for protecting civilians,” said Roth. “He needs to lean on all actors, protect civilians, and ensure accountability. Only an impartial international investigation can achieve that.”
Human Rights Watch also called upon the Israeli government to:
Human Rights Watch urged both Israel and Hamas to support efforts by the United Nations to create areas that have a dramatically enhanced capacity to protect civilians from the ongoing hostilities and to take all feasible measures to avoid military operations near such areas, such as UN schools and other places accommodating displaced persons.
Source: Human Rights Watch
The United Nations‘ most senior human rights official said last night that the Israeli military may have committed war crimes in Gaza. The warning came as Israeli troops pressed on with the deadly offensive in defiance of a UN security council resolution calling for a ceasefire.
Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has called for “credible, independent and transparent” investigations into possible violations of humanitarian law, and singled out an incident this week in Zeitoun, south-east of Gaza City, where up to 30 Palestinians in one house were killed by Israeli shelling.
Pillay, a former international criminal court judge from South Africa, told the BBC the incident “appears to have all the elements of war crimes”.
The accusation came as Israel kept up its two-week-old air and ground offensive in Gaza and dismissed as “unworkable” the UN security council resolution which had called for “an immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire”.
Protests against the offensive were held across the world yesterday just as diplomacy to halt the conflict appeared to falter.
With the Palestinian casualty toll rising to around 800 dead, including 265 children, and more than 3,000 injured, fresh evidence emerged yesterday of the killings in Zeitoun. It was “one of the gravest incidents” since Israel’s offensive began two weeks ago, the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs said yesterday.
“There is an international obligation on the part of soldiers in their position to protect civilians, not to kill civilians indiscriminately in the first place, and when they do, to make sure that they help the wounded,” Pillay told Reuters. “In this particular case these children were helpless and the soldiers were close by,” she added.
An Israeli military spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich, said the incident was still being examined. “We don’t warn people to go to other buildings, this is not something we do,” she said. “We don’t know this case, we don’t know that we attacked it.”
Despite the intense bombardment, militants in Gaza fired at least 30 rockets into southern Israel yesterday. Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, told al-Jazeera TV: “This resolution doesn’t mean that the war is over. We call on Palestinian fighters to mobilise and be ready to face the offensive, and we urge the Arab masses to carry on with their angry protests.”
Israeli officials said they could not be expected to halt their military operation while the rockets continued and said they first wanted an end to the rocket fire and a “mechanism” to prevent Hamas rearming in future.
“The whole idea that Israel will unilaterally stop protecting our people when Hamas is sending rockets into our cities to kill our people is not a reasonable request of Israel,” said Mark Regev, spokesman for prime minister Ehud Olmert. Israel wanted security for its people in southern Israel, he said, and dismissed suggestions his military might seek to topple Hamas, saying they were “not in the regime-change business”.
Israeli public opinion still strongly favours the war. One poll of Jewish Israelis yesterday, by the War and Peace Index, said 90% of the population supported continuing the operation until Israel achieved all its goals.
Olmert held a meeting of his security cabinet, and on the agenda was discussion about whether to intensify the offensive by launching a fresh stage of attacks in which Israeli troops would invade the major urban areas of Gaza as more reservists were called up. There was no word on the outcome.
So far 13 Israelis have been killed in this conflict, of whom three were civilians.
Another 23 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military yesterday. Seven from one family, including an infant, died when Israeli jets bombed a five-storey building in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza. There was heavy aerial bombing and artillery fire across the territory.
More than 20,000 Gazans have fled their homes in the north of the strip and thousands more in the south. In some cases Israeli troops have told them to leave, or dropped leaflets warning them to evacuate their homes. Some are even dividing their families between different addresses for fear of losing them all in a single air strike.
“Many people are leaving their homes and moving to the centre of the cities,” said Abdel Karim Ashour, 53, who works with a local aid agency, the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee. He, his wife and their four children fled their house on the coastal road in northern Gaza on the third day of the conflict. He sent the four children to stay with his brother while he and his wife are staying at a friend’s house. “We were in an area of heavy shelling, so we left and I divided the family to try to reduce the victims if we face any trouble. We try and keep in touch by telephone but there are problems with the network,” he said. “We’re just hoping for a ceasefire. If the fighting goes on there will be more victims.”
Source: The Guardian