Report accuses Israel, Hamas of Gaza war crimes
PARIS - Amnesty International accused both Israel and the militant Hamas movement that controls Gaza yesterday of committing war crimes during the three weeks of fighting there earlier this year.
The human rights group’s 117-page report singled out what it called the “unprecedented’’ scale and intensity of the Israeli onslaught and the “unlawful’’ Palestinian use of rockets against Israeli civilians.
Both Hamas and Israel rejected the report as unbalanced.
The Israeli military suggested that the “slant’’ of the report “indicates that the organization succumbed to the manipulations’’ of Hamas. Moreover, it said in a statement, the report ignored Israeli efforts to minimize civilian casualties.
The statement also said Israel’s investigations into the behavior of its forces during the war in late December and January proved that its military “operated throughout the fighting in accordance with international law, maintaining high ethical and professional standards.’’ It acknowledged, however, that the inquiries “found a few, unfortunate incidents’’ resulting from Hamas’s decision “to fight from within civilian population centers.’’
A Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, quoted by the Associated Press, declared: “The report equated the victim and the executioner and denied our people’s right to resist the occupation. The report ignores the scale of destruction and serious crimes committed by the occupation in Gaza and provides a misleading description in order to reduce the magnitude of the Israeli crimes.’’
The Amnesty International report was the second this week by an international human rights organization calling into question Israeli military practices in the Gaza war.
A report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch said 29 civilians were killed in what appeared to be six missile strikes by Israeli drones. The group questioned whether Israeli forces had taken “all feasible precautions’’ to avoid civilian casualties. Israel’s military has never acknowledged using the remotely piloted planes to fire missiles.
Amnesty International, which is based in London, released its report yesterday explicitly rejecting Israeli claims that Hamas used civilians as human shields but said that in several cases Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians, including children, as “human shields, endangering their lives by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions.’’
“The scale and intensity of the attacks on Gaza were unprecedented,’’ the report said, citing the deaths of hundreds of unarmed civilians, including many children.
