Human Rights Watch said Israel has failed to demonstrate that it will be conduct an exhaustive and impartial investigations into violations of the laws of war by its troops during last year’s offensive on the Gaza Strip.
HRW said that there is a need for an independent investigation, to hold accountable those who committed abuses, including senior military officials and politicians who set the policies violating the laws of war.
Human Rights Watch interviewed on February 4, 2010 military lawyers from the Israeli army to discuss the investigations. In the mean time, Israelis are investigating, but officials did not provide any information showing that the investigations will be fair and thorough, or it will face the decisions and policies of the leadership that led unlawfully to the death of civilians.
Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, said: “Israel claims that it was investigating credibly and fairly, but so far it has failed to prove this.” “There is a need for an independent investigation to understand why many civilians were killed in this manner, and to provide justice for victims of unlawful attacks”, he continued.
In one case, it appears that the military investigation did not pay attention to important evidence: the remains of a bomb found in the Al-Bader mill near Jabalya. According to the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza conflict, Israel denied targeting the mill from the air, despite the released proof footage, obtained by Human Rights Watch, showing what appeared to be the remains of an aerial bomb-specifically a 500-pound MK 82 bomb. The UN demining team said they defused the bomb.
Jerusalem’s mayor threatened last week to demolish 200 homes in Palestinian neighbourhoods of the city in an act even he conceded would probably bring long-simmering tensions over housing in East Jerusalem to a boil.
His uncompromising stance is the latest stage in a protracted legal battle over a single building towering above the jumble of modest homes of Silwan, a deprived and overcrowded Palestinian community lying just outside the Old City walls, in the shadow of the silver-topped al Aqsa mosque. Read More…
On Earth Day in Palestine, I wrote this piece for the Huffington Post. It’s about the Bustan Qaraaqa farm in northern Beit Sahour, where Palestinians and international volunteers are starting an ambitious re-greening project — to counteract the Israeli land-steal by settlement colonies, the expanding food crisis and the desertification via global climate change.
It was cut for content and word count; below is my longer version.
This Earth Day in occupied Palestine, the last rain has finished its wet sweep over the ancient land as carpets of deep red hanoon (Rinunculus) flowers burst into another sparkling Spring. But even within the renewed grace of a turning season, Israel’s 62-year old colonial-military occupation disfigures the scenery as Palestinians lose their land to settlements in the West Bank, bury another family member in the wrecked, open-air prison of Gaza, or wait for hours at Israeli checkpoints, and years inside prisons. As always in this part of the world, exquisite beauty and bottomless despair interweave; together they become a living, breathing microcosm of the human capacity for both unmitigated suffering and resourceful tenacity. Read More…
It’s green and the people doing it consider themselves green, so tree-planting should really be a genuinely ecological act – and this is how it is indeed presented with regularity by the Jewish National Fund each year at Tu Bishvat, Jewish Arbor Day. But there is nothing environmental or ecological about enlisting tree-planting to promote the protracted occupation of the West Bank. Read More…
The following questions elicit the same answer in each instance. No other country in the world conducts itself at home and in world affairs with such impunity as Israel. This raises the question, why does Israel get away with it time and time again while other countries are condemned and punished? It is time that we demand answers from are leaders and insist that Israel be held accountable for its breaches. Read More…
The following blog entry begins with a Haaretz report (5 Feb)“about two Israeli curators who stumbled upon an arms cache dating back to the British Mandate at a Synagogue in Hod Hasharon. The weapons, which included grenades and bullet casings, were apparently stored in the building by the Hagannah Jewish militia…”
Lawrence of Cyberia says: this is all a bit ironic, in view of Israel’s insistence that Hamas doesn’t play fair because it hides weapons in mosques, forcing Israel to bomb them. He then explains why this matters.
The reason for crying foul when Zionists carry out the very same actions that they condemn as beyond the pale in others is that Zionists select and publicize these specific actions by their opponents in order to portray those opponents as “people not like us”. Israel needs to portray the Palestinian people under its rule as people not like us, because it does not wish to be held accountable for treating them in ways that defy accepted standards of international law or even simple human decency. And the way to get away with treating subject peoples in a manner that defies normal human conventions is to demonize them as not quite human like us. The problem then lies not in “our” failure to observe common human decency, but in “their” failure to be properly human. Read More…
The former US president Jimmy Carter set off a firestorm in 2006 when he said that Israel would have to choose between maintaining an apartheid occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinians. That Mr Carter brokered Israel’s most important peace treaty with an Arab country was immaterial; he was branded an enemy of Israel, an anti-Semite and even a Holocaust-denier. Read More…
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following professional video was based on a fine article by Joe Mowrey of the same name published in Dissident Voice on 19 January 2010. It was made by Anthony Lawson in collaboration with Joe as fair comment. This is just the kind of reporting that we ought to be getting in our media, but it never happens. Again we are relying on our supporters to spread this video far and wide.
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