The UNHRC report said that while both Israelis and Palestinians were “profoundly shaken” by the summer war, in Gaza “the scale of the devastation was unprecedented”. By last summer, Hamas could – and did – reach 80 percent of Israel’s population with its rockets.
Advertisement
“The most that we can hope for out of this long and arduous process of inquiry is that we will push the ball of justice a small further down the field”, Mary McGowan Davis, chairwoman of the U.N. commission of inquiry, told a news conference.
Attack tunnels dug from the Palestinian side into Israel also spread fear, the report added.
Palestinian armed groups meanwhile fired 4,881 rockets and 1,753 mortars towards Israel, killing six civilians and injuring at least 1,600 others.
The 50-day war killed over 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, and left 11,231 injured, while 73 Israelis, mostly soldiers, also died.
“The commission recognizes that the general warnings issued by the Israel Defense Forces saved lives“.
Israel on June 14 defended its conduct in the Gaza war as both “lawful” and “legitimate” in a detailed inter-ministerial report.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that throughout the conflict Israel acted according to global law and he criticized the U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday as a body that does “everything but worry about human rights”. “Israel doesn’t commit war crimes”, he said, according to an e-mail from his office.
Concerned about the increasing use of live ammunition for crowd control by the Israeli Security Forces, which raises the likelihood of death or serious injury, the commission said, “The number killed in these three months was equivalent to the total for the whole of 2013”.
But as horrifying as those statistics are, it is the children who give us once more the capacity to care.
The UN investigators refused to say Monday whether they thought the ICC was an appropriate forum for ensuring accountability for the abuses committed during the 2014 Gaza conflict.
In six of 15 residential strikes examined in detail by the UN panel, and in most cases reported by non-governmental groups, there was small or no information why these buildings were military targets, the commission said. Washington cast the only vote against launching the investigation last July.
Schabas resigned his position on the commission in February after it was learned he briefly was hired as a legal consultant in 2012 by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Schabas was replaced by Davis, an American jurist.
The only other panel member is Doudou Dienne of Senegal, an ex- United Nations watchdog on racism and on post-conflict in the Ivory Coast.
More than 280 interviews were conducted and 500 written submissions were received by the commission which pointed out hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed in their own homes, especially women and children.
A United Nations inquiry into the 2014 Gaza war has accused Israeli and Palestinian factions of multiple potential violations of global law including suspected war crimes.
The report also said that indiscriminate firing of thousands of rockets and mortars at Israel “appeared to have the intention of spreading terror among civilians there”.
“Palestinian and Israeli children were savagely affected by the events”, the report notes in a distinct effort at even-handedness.
“The commission was deeply moved by the huge suffering of Palestinian and Israeli victims, who have been subjected to repeated rounds of violence”, reads the conclusions section of the 183-page report.
They urged Israel to “break with its recent lamentable track record in holding wrongdoers accountable”. “The commission also condemns the extrajudicial executions of alleged ‘collaborators,’ which amount to a war crime”. If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article.
Advertisement
