Israeli War Crimes in Gaza Confirmed by Judge

NO EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN ISRAELI WAR CRIMES AND ARMED RESISTANCE BY THE
VICTIMS OF ISRAELI OCCUPATION AND MASS MURDER

The Zionist media are conspiring to soften the impact of the highly
embarrassing news of Judge Richard Goldstone's confirmation of
widespread war crimes committed by Israeli military forces in Gaza last
December and January, by spinning the Goldstone report as, "UN says
Palestinians and Israelis found to be guilty of war crimes."

This spin is easily revealed to be a species of Talmudic delusion by
citing a solitary datum: during the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza
"some 1,300 Palestinians were killed, including at least several hundred
civilians; as well as 13 Israelis: 10 soldiers and 3 civilians" (NY
Times).

It is obvious to everyone except the propaganda ministers who write the
headlines for the American press, that there is no equivalence between
the crimes of the Israeli occupiers and the relatively ineffective armed
resistance of the severely oppressed Palestinians.

The following is from the New York Times online, Sept. 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/middleeast/16gaza.html?hp

A United Nations fact-finding mission investigating the three-week war
in Gaza...issued a lengthy, scathing report on Tuesday (Sept. 15)...The
four-member mission (is) led by Justice Richard Goldstone, a widely
respected South African judge...The report, the bulk of which focused on
the Israeli violations, said that during the war, Israeli forces engaged
in a deliberate policy of collective punishment in furtherance of "an
overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population"
through blockades and the destruction of food, water and sanitation
systems of its people...

In one case, armored bulldozers of the Israeli forces systematically
flattened the chicken coops of a farm that reportedly supplied 10
percent of the Gazan egg market, killing all 31,000 chickens inside. In
another, the forces carried out a strike on a sewage plant wall, sending
200,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into neighboring farmland, the report
said. The panel did not find a justifiable reason for the Israelis'
actions in either case.

It also found that the Israeli forces used disproportionate force
against the Palestinian civilian population. In a number of cases, it
said, Israeli forces launched "direct attacks against civilians with
lethal outcome," even when the facts indicated no justifiable military
objective. Those incidents, the report concluded, amounted to war
crimes.

Israeli forces twice shelled civilian hospitals in Gaza, but in neither
case was the attack justified, the report found. In the attack on Al
Quds Hospital, the shelling of the building and an adjacent ambulance
facility with white phosphorus shells caused fires that took a day to
extinguish, and at no point was any warning given of an imminent strike,
the report said. The panel found no evidence of the enemy fire that the
Israeli military cited as rationale for its attack.

Another event that the panel judged equivalent to a war crime took place
in the Samouni neighborhood in Gaza City, when Israel soldiers shelled a
house where soldiers had forced Palestinian civilians to gather. In
seven cases, the report found, "civilians were shot while they were
trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags
and in some cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do
so."

Israeli forces also intentionally attacked civilians in aiming a missile
strike at a mosque during the early evening prayer, killing 15 people,
and in firing antipersonnel flechette munitions, which release thousands
of metal darts, on a crowd of family members and neighbors at a
condolence tent, killing 5. "These incidents indicate that the
instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a
low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian
population," the report said. The conduct of the Israeli armed forces in
these instances, it said, "constitute grave breaches of the Fourth
Geneva Convention" and as such, "give rise to individual criminal
responsibility."

Palestinian armed groups, the group found, fired repeated rockets and
mortars into southern Israel. By failing to distinguish between military
targets and the civilian population, those actions also "constitute war
crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity," the report said.

Responding to Israeli allegations that Palestinian fighters used
civilians as human shields, the panel found that Palestinian armed
groups did launch rockets from urban areas in Gaza, and that Palestinian
armed groups "were not always dressed in a way that distinguished them
from civilians."

However, the mission found no evidence that Palestinian combatants
"mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding
themselves from attack," the report said, nor did it find evidence to
suggest that Palestinian armed groups "either directed civilians to
areas where attacks were being launched or forced civilians to remain
within the vicinity of the attacks."

The mission was tasked by United Nations Human Rights Council in April
to investigate all violations of international human rights law and
humanitarian law that might have been committed during the conflict. As
part of Israel's refusal to cooperate, it banned the panel members from
entering the country. The panel made two visits to Gaza, entering from
Egypt, but conducted the bulk of their research from Geneva.

The panel conducted 188 interviews, reviewed 10,000 pages of documents,
and viewed more than 1,000 photographs and videos before drawing its
conclusions. The panel said that Israel did not respond to a
comprehensive list of questions, but that Palestinian authorities in
both Gaza and the West Bank cooperated.

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