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5 nov 2019
How Israel redefines international law as a cover for its Gaza crimes
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Friends of 15-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Ibrahim Ayoub, who was shot and killed by Israeli army along the Israel-Gaza border, sit by his grave in a cemetery in Beit Lahia on 21 April, 2018

Israel's approach to international law can be summed up as 'If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it'

Since removing settlers and redeploying its armed forces to the perimeter fence in 2005, Israel has subjected Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to numerous devastating assaults, a blockade, and routine attacks on the likes of farmers and fishermen.

Many of these policies have been the subject of substantial condemnation – from Palestinians, of course, as well as Israeli and international human rights groups, and even world leaders and politicians – albeit, critically, with little concrete action at the state level.

Israel, however, has sought to thwart even the possibility of meaningful accountability. Its approach has been very simple: in the face of criticism for breaking the law, change the law. 

Providing cover

More precisely, Israel has been working hard to develop, and promote, interpretations of international law that provide cover for its policies and tactics in the Gaza Strip.

In January 2009, in the aftermath of an Israeli offensive that led to the UN-commissioned Goldstone report, a lengthy piece was published in Haaretz on the work being done by the international law division within the Military Advocate General’s office.

These are the officials responsible for vetting (or perhaps rubber-stamping) the military’s actions and tactics, and providing legal justification for such actions.

One of the interviewees in the article was Daniel Reisner, who had earlier served as the head of the international law division. “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it,” he said. “The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries … International law progresses through violations.”

It is the Gaza Strip that Israel has used as a laboratory for such “progressive” violations. One example is the status of Gaza itself. Since 2005, Israel’s position has been that Gaza is neither occupied nor sovereign, but rather constitutes a “hostile entity”. 

In her recent book Justice for Some, scholar Noura Erakat spells out the implications of such a designation, which renders Gaza “neither a state wherein Palestinians have the right to police and protect themselves nor an occupied territory whose civilian population Israel had a duty to protect”.

“In effect, Israel usurped the right of Palestinians to defend themselves because they did not belong to an embryonic sovereign, relinquished its obligations as an occupying power, and expanded its right to unleash military force, thus rendering Palestinians in the Gaza Strip triply vulnerable,” Erakat noted.

Deliberate targeting

The claim that the Gaza Strip is no longer occupied is, of course, flawed, not least because Israel has retained effective control over the territory. Its armed forces enter at will on land and at sea, and Israel retains control over Gaza’s airspace, electromagnetic spectrum, most entry-exit points and the population registry – in addition to the ongoing blockade.

The Gaza Strip is merely one part of the occupied Palestinian territory, along with the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), that forms a single territorial entity. Gaza’s occupied status since 2005 has thus been affirmed by numerous relevant bodies, including the UN Security Council.

Israeli officials’ legal “creativity” is most frequently demonstrated by some of the tactics adopted by the Israeli military during assaults.

During the 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza, 142 Palestinian families had three or more members killed in the same incident. Such shocking figures were partly the result of Israel deliberately targeting dozens of Palestinian family homes, in addition to those struck as a result of indiscriminate bombardment.

Key here was Israel’s determination that any (alleged) member of an armed Palestinian faction was a legitimate target, even when they were not participating in fighting – ie, at home with their families – and that family members became legitimate “collateral damage” on account of the presence of a suspect in the home (even, by the way, if that individual wasn’t actually at home at the time). As one Israeli official put it: “You call it a home, we call it a command centre.”

Civilian casualties

Despite the fact that under international law, Israel needed to show that any targeted structure was performing a military function, as rights group B’Tselem described, “no official claimed that there was any connection between a house that was targeted and any specific military activity there”. 

Therefore, the Israeli military’s explanations for the destruction of homes appeared “to be no more than a cover-up for the actual reason for the destruction, namely the identity of the occupants” – that is to say, these were “punitive house demolitions … carried out from the air, with occupants still inside”.

Another tactic used by the Israeli military is the issuing of “warnings” to civilians, whether in the form of phone calls or text messages to specific properties, or leaflets dropped to entire neighbourhoods. Israel presents this tactic as evidence that it goes out of its way to avoid civilian casualties, even though such warnings are, in fact, an obligation rather than “acts of charity”.

Crucially, of course, such warnings do not remove protected status from civilian residents. However, there is good evidence to suggest that this is not a view shared within the Israeli military.

In the aforementioned 2009 Haaretz article, one official said: “The people who go into a house despite a warning do not have to be taken into account in terms of injury to civilians, because they are voluntary human shields. From the legal point of view, I do not have to show consideration for them.”

So, in a disturbing twist, while warnings are presented as minimising civilian casualties, in reality, they serve to facilitate the attacks and can even contribute to the death toll.

Normalising illegality

These are just a few examples, as Israel seeks to normalise the illegal, with two goals in mind. Note that it was after the publication of the Goldstone report that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “instructed government officials to draft proposals for changing international laws of war”.

Israel’s “innovations” in international law are thus intended to facilitate the increasingly brutal suppression of Palestinians on the ground, while internationally, such interpretations are promoted to either muddy the waters in legal fora or, ultimately, to gain support from other state parties.

It is important to remember that the problem of accountability predates more recent developments. Israel has long violated international law, and justified certain policies in legal terms – from the confiscation of land in occupied territory to the establishment of settlements.

This helps us understand that the key problem is a political one – and that the answer to how to challenge impunity and resist Israel’s “innovative” interpretations of the law is the same: political pressure.

Failure on this front will be felt most keenly by those most vulnerable – the Palestinians.

14 nov 2017
Remembering Israel’s ‘Operation Pillar of Defence’
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By Hanaa Hasan

On 14 November 2012, Israel launched “Operation Pillar of Defence” against the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Over the following eight days, almost 175 Palestinians were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. Five years later, Gaza is still subject to Israeli aggression, in violation of the terms of the ceasefire agreement.

What: Operation Pillar of Defence

When: 14-21 November 2012

Where: The Gaza Strip

What happened?

Tensions between the Israeli occupying forces and Gaza escalated in the days leading up to the military operation. On 10 November, Israel responded to an attack on a military jeep by killing four Palestinian teenagers while they played football in a Gaza sports stadium. Days of rocket fire from both sides ultimately led to Israel launching an official offensive, ostensibly against the besieged territory’s ruling party, Hamas.

On Wednesday afternoon, 14 November, the Israeli army targeted and killed Ahmed Jabari, the chief of the Hamas military wing, prompting widespread protests. The army also struck 20 other points in the Gaza Strip, including residential areas, claiming that weapons were hidden in civilian neighbourhoods. More than 10 people were killed on the first day, including 11-month-old Omar Misharawi, the son of BBC Video Editor Jihad Mishrawi.

Israel continued its missile strikes throughout the night, and Hamas responded with rocket fire into Israeli suburbs and cities the next day, although no one was killed.

On 16 November, the then Prime Minister of Egypt, Hisham Qandil, visited Gaza to show solidarity with the Palestinian people, but a three hour ceasefire that was arranged for his visit did not last long; both Israel and Hamas accused the other of firing over the border during the brief lull. That night, Israel called up over 75,000 army reservists and visible signs of a build-up of ground forces near the Gaza border prompted many analysts to believe that a ground offensive could be imminent.

The Israeli government broadened its targets in the offensive to include Hamas government sites as well as allegedly military targets, launching an air strike on Saturday, 17 November, that destroyed the offices of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. The World Health Organisation condemned the strikes, stating that Gaza’s hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties and faced a critical shortage of drugs and medical supplies. The same day, Haaretz quoted Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai saying that, “The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.”

In the occupied West Bank, hundreds of Palestinians demonstrated in support of the people in Gaza but were met with aggression from Israeli forces; dozens were injured in subsequent clashes.

What happened next?

The bombardment of the Gaza Strip continued over the weekend, with the Israeli navy firing into the enclave as well; this was a first and the naval barrage killed a 13 year-old girl and her uncle on Sunday evening. Two buildings housing journalists from Sky News, ITN, Al-Quds TV and Press TV were also hit in an Israeli attack, injuring several reporters. The NGO Reporters without Borders condemned Israel’s action, and the Foreign Press Association issued a statement expressing concern about the strike, pointing to a UN Security Council statement that forbade all attacks against journalists in combat zones.

That day also witnessed the highest death toll of any single strike during the operation, when a missile destroyed the family home of Jamal Mahmoud Yassin Al-Dalu, killing twelve people; ten of his family members, including five children and an elderly woman, plus two of the family’s neighbours, including another elderly woman. Israel later admitted that the strike on the residential building had been intentional and that the target was Mohamed Al-Dalu, a police officer who was killed in the attack; neighbours insisted that he had no political affiliations.

Over the next few days, the Israeli bombardment killed dozens of people in Gaza, while several people were injured in Israel as a result of rockets fired by the beleaguered Palestinians. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Tel Aviv on Tuesday 20 November, to try to promote a ceasefire. She discussed the volatile situation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but did not meet with Hamas, due its designation by the Americans as a “terrorist organisation”.

The next day, Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr stood alongside Clinton and announced that a ceasefire in Israel-Gaza hostilities would take effect at 9pm local time. The truce came after hours of intense shuttle-diplomacy involving Clinton, as well as the then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Before the announcement, attacks rocked both sides of the border. Inside Israel, a bomb blast on a bus in central Tel Aviv injured 28 people, three seriously. In Gaza City, the bombing met with approval from Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, who called it revenge for civilian deaths in Gaza in recent days, particularly that of the Al-Dalu family. Israeli bombs rained down on the territory in response.

After the Israel occupation forces agreed to a ceasefire, the residents of the Gaza Strip enjoyed their first peaceful night in a week. Four Israelis and some 174 Palestinians, 107 of whom were civilians, were killed in the eight-day conflict.

Netanyahu declared the Israeli offensive to be a success, saying that his forces had dealt a painful blow to Hamas, destroying thousands of rockets and killing many “terrorist commanders”. Hamas also claimed victory, despite the Palestinian losses.

As per the ceasefire agreement, Israel was required to “stop all hostilities in the Gaza Strip land, sea and air including incursions and targeting of individuals.” The same was required from the Palestinian factions. However, Israel’s regular incursions against civilians in the Strip as well as the continuing blockade, mean that, five years later, the Palestinians in the enclave are still not at peace.

Palestinian factions mark 5th anniversary of al-Jabari’s assassination
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Dozens of resistance fighters affiliated with the armed wings of all Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip organized a parade on Tuesday evening in commemoration of the al-Qassam leader Ahmed al-Jaabari.

The parade was organized in front of the house of martyr Ahmed al-Jaabari, commander of the Qassam Brigades the armed wing of Hamas, who was assassinated by Israel in 2012.

Al-Jaabari’s assassination triggered an eight-day war on Gaza Strip, during which hundreds of civilians were killed and injured in the besieged Strip.

22 july 2015
Rare Cancer Caused by Israeli Bombs in Gaza
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The home next to Fatima’s that was bombed.

During the 2012 Zionist massacre in Gaza, named by the occupation as Operation Pillar of Defense, many buildings near Mohamed’s home were bombed.

Less than a year after the aggression, while playing with him, Mohamed’s mother found a lump in his neck. At this time he was eight years old.

They went to Shifa hospital, where he was diagnosed with Thyroid cancer. There he underwent the first surgery, but the operation was not successful.

After that he was allowed to travel to the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948, in order to be treated in the Hospital of Haifa. Where he underwent a second surgery and received radiotherapy, unavailable in Gaza.

The Palestinian Authority pays the treatment to the Israeli hospital. For this reason, according to Mohamed’s family, the Palestinian Authority tries to prevent every journey of Mohamed from Gaza to Haifa’s hospital.

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As Mohamed’s mother says, the Israeli doctors told them that this kind of cancer is due to the bombings near their home. They also told her that in 2016 the cancer rates in Gaza will rise 70% more, and that for the following 4 years it will keep growing.

Since the 2012 aggression Mohamed’s father has developed asthma as well.

In 2014 Mohamed’s home was attacked by Zionist warships. Luckily they weren’t at home in this moment. Mohamed’s family referred ISM to Fatimah, a 50 years old woman, mother of six children, who lives near them.

During the 2008 massacre, a mosque, a government building and a home were bombed next to her house. Four years ago she was diagnosed as well with thyroid cancer.

The two oncologists interviewed by ISM in Shifa Hospital and Rantisi Children Hospital, in Gaza, agreed that these kinds of cancer are due to the Zionist bombs, and explained that they were very rare before the massive aggressions against the Gaza Strip.

Note: The names have been changed, as Mohamed and Fatimah are afraid of losing the permission to leave the Strip to receive the treatment.

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