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geneva conventions
Amnesty War Crimes Probe Exposes Israel's 'Wanton Destruction' in Gaza
"The creation of any 'buffer zone' must not amount to the collective punishment of the Palestinian civilians who lived in these neighborhoods," warned one Amnesty campaigner.
Sep 05, 2024
Amnesty International said Thursday that the Israeli military should be investigated for the "war crimes of wanton destruction and of collective punishment" over its destruction of entire communities along Gaza's border with Israel.
"Using bulldozers and manually laid explosives, the Israeli military has unlawfully destroyed agricultural land and civilian buildings, razing entire neighborhoods, including homes, schools, and mosques," the London-based rights group said in a new investigation.
Amnesty analyzed satellite imagery, as well as photos and videos posted online by invading Israel Defense Forces troops between October and May, and found that the IDF has cleared wide swathes of land up to 1.2 miles (1.8 km) wide along Gaza's eastern border.
"In some videos, Israeli soldiers are seen posing for pictures or toasting in celebration as buildings are demolished in the background," the report states.
Israeli forces laid waste to much of Khuza'a in Khan Younis governate, under the pretext that Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel from the town on October 7.
Salem Qudeih, a teacher who lived in Khuza'a about a mile from the border, told Amnesty that "around my family home we had a three dunam (0.7 acre) orchard full of fruit trees. They were all destroyed. Only an apple tree and a rose were left."
"I had bees and produced honey. All of it is gone now," he added. "Out of the 222 houses of my relatives in the area, only about a dozen remain. My home—where I lived with my wife, my five daughters, and one son—was completely destroyed."
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty's senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, said in a statement: "The Israeli military's relentless campaign of ruin in Gaza is one of wanton destruction. Our research has shown how Israeli forces have obliterated residential buildings, forced thousands of families from their homes, and rendered their land uninhabitable."
"Our analysis reveals a pattern along the eastern perimeter of Gaza that is consistent with the systematic destruction of an entire area," she continued. "These homes were not destroyed as the result of intense fighting. Rather, the Israeli military deliberately razed the land after they had taken control of the area."
"The creation of any 'buffer zone' must not amount to the collective punishment of the Palestinian civilians who lived in these neighborhoods," Guevara-Rosas added. "Israel's measures to protect Israelis from attacks from Gaza must be carried out in conformity with its obligations under international law, including the prohibition of wanton destruction and of collective punishment."
"The Israeli military deliberately razed the land after they had taken control of the area."
Other experts—including United Nations officials and scholars—have previously highlighted what Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian and University of Chicago professor, described as "one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history."
In the 335 days since October 7, Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 145,000 Palestinians in Gaza while forcibly displacing almost all of the embattled strip's 2.3 million people and destroying hundreds of thousands of homes and other structures, according to Palestinian and international officials. Rebuilding after Israel's obliteration of Gaza's civilian infrastructure is expected to cost over $18.5 billion, or nearly Palestine's entire annual gross domestic product.
Israel is currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Meanwhile, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan has applied for warrants to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leaders for alleged war crimes including extermination.
"International humanitarian law, which applies in situations of armed conflict, including during military occupation, is comprised of rules whose central purpose is to limit, to the maximum extent feasible, human suffering in times of armed conflict," Amnesty explained Thursday.
The group noted that under the Fourth Geneva Convention, "extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly," is a war crime.
Additionally, the treaty bans collective punishment of civilians, stating that "no protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed."
Amnesty has repeatedly
accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza and has urged the ICC to open investigations into multiple "indiscriminate" and "disproportionate" IDF massacres, as well as torture and other alleged human rights violations.
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US Media Weeps for Georgia School Shooting Victims, But Not Those Massacred in Gaza
The carnage and suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli military is daily, so it has ceased being reported on at all.
Sep 05, 2024
The ongoing carnage wrought on ordinary Americans by this country’s bizarrely permissive gun laws dominated the cable news networks for hours on end Wednesday after a 14-year-old shooter killed four people and wounded nine at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
Two of the dead were also 14-year-olds, destined never to grow older. The other two fatalities were teachers. As a teacher, I take their deaths personally. The teen shooter had spoken about killing people last year, but since Georgia does not have a red flag law, guns were not removed from his house. The deaths of the teens, and the wounding of eight other students, along with a teacher, underscore the horror of these mass shootings, their little lives cut unforgivably short, their parents’ lives blighted in ways that give nightmares to all parents of a child. Regular mass shootings are not permitted in actually civilized countries, whether Europe or Japan. They are as much an American peculiar institution as our form of plantation slavery was, and they are just as rooted in a valuing of property over humanity (in the case of slavery it involved turning humanity into property).
By the magic of empathy and identification, the news hits us in the gut when we hear of these strangers torn to pieces by hot bullets. They are also Americans. It shouldn’t matter, but the vigil-keepers and interviewees are blonde and white. They are like the majority of Americans.
Those who mouth “thoughts and prayers” and who clearly do not feel the deaths viscerally perhaps lack that empathy. Perhaps they are sociopaths, who cannot empathize with others. Some of the unsympathetic, though, distance themselves from the rawness of these murders by seeing them as a cost of living in a “free” society, by which they mean a society that has few effective regulations about the ownership and use of guns. They see the mass shootings the way many people see automobile deaths, as “accidents,” as a feature of life that they believe unavoidable. Many automobile deaths, too, however, are avoidable, and they are collisions, not accidents. Some 25% of them are from drunk driving, which is a conscious choice and not an accident at all. The most common cause of collisions is distracted driving, which also results from choices people make, and it is a problem that is getting worse. As for guns, it is odd that so intentional an act as premeditated murder should be classed as a natural disaster by so many Americans.
Sociologists use the notion of framing to understand the stories people tell themselves about events. Gun safety advocates see responsible gun ownership as requiring laws and regulations that protect owners and others. Those men who are insouciant about mass shootings think requiring gun safety detracts from their individual freedom (and possibly from their manhood, which frankly speaks poorly of them).
Although the cable news channels went into hyperdrive covering the sickening events in Georgie, they ignored other killings of children on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Israeli bombardments killed 42 Palestinian victims in massacres of three families. The Gaza Ministry of Health said, “Many people are still trapped under the rubble and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them.”
Judging by past such bombardments, a majority of the victims, over 20 people, were children and women. The Israeli military allows an astonishing, and sickening, 20 civilian deaths for each militant of the Qassam Brigades that it kills with drones and rockets. No civilized military behaves in this way. It is creepy. U.S. officers would be rightly court-martialed for implementing such lax and inhumane rules of engagement. Officers have told me that the Geneva Conventions are their “Bible.” They are deeply angered when it is suggested that the Israeli military is behaving no worse than the American does.
The 22 or more women and children killed and the dozens of others injured or trapped beneath the rubble in Gaza did not receive even 15 seconds of air time on America’s multi-billion-dollar “news” screens on Wednesday.
I don’t understand why. Is it that they are not coded as “white?” But if you met many of them, you couldn’t tell them by skin color from many “white” Americans, including Italian-Americans. Is it because they aren’t Americans? But opinion polling shows tremendous U.S. empathy with Ukrainian victims of Russian bombardment.
For some, indifference is achieved by framing. “People die in war,” said President Joe Biden. Some people take seriously ridiculous Israeli army allegations of having killed 13,000 Hamas fighters, which makes the total dead of nearly 41,000 (though this is a vast underestimate) seem like par for the course. In fact, the Israeli military counts any young able-bodied male as a militant. And since they kill so many people from the air, the Israelis don’t really know whom they killed in many instances. The U.S. used to do that in Vietnam when it engaged in body counts. One of my late friends, a Green Beret, complained to me bitterly about such body counts or “kiting.” “If it was dead and it was Vietnamese, it was Viet Cong,” he said bitterly.
So the murdered children of Gaza (the Israeli military ROE amounts to mass murder in International Humanitarian Law) are put off stage. They aren’t configured as “news” as U.S. mass media conceive it. The carnage and suffering is daily, so it has ceased being reported on at all.
Boutique outlets like Middle East Eye, helmed by veteran Middle East correspondent David Hearst, show us the reality, which is not easier to take than the deaths in Winder, Georgia — that is, if we haven’t erected frames that prevent us from seeing and feeling it:
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Extremist Israeli Leaders Slammed for 'Reckless Pursuit' of New West Bank Colony
"My life's mission," said Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is "to fight the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state"—even as an overwhelming majority of the world's nations support independence for Palestine.
Aug 14, 2024
The Israeli government said Wednesday that it has completed plans for the first new apartheid settlement in the occupied West Bank since 2017, a move the country's far-right finance minister said was due in part to increasing international recognition of Palestinian statehood amid Israel's obliteration of Gaza and a recent World Court affirming the occupation's illegality.
The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, also known as the Civil Administration, announced what's known as a "blue line"—which defines and delimits the boundaries of a new settlement—for Nahal Heletz, one of five Jewish-only colonies
proposed for construction or expansion on stolen Palestinian land. If built, the nearly 150-acre colony would connect the Gush Etzion settlement bloc with Jerusalem.
"The connection of Gush Etzion to Jerusalem by establishing a new settlement is a historic moment," Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a settler, said Wednesday. "No anti-Israel and anti-Zionist decision will stop the continued development of the settlement enterprise."
"We will continue to fight the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state and establish facts on the ground," Smotrich continued, referring to the longtime Israeli practice of violating international law by colonizing and annexing Palestinian land to establish what one legal scholar described as "de facto possession with the aim of attaining de jure possession."
Smotrich added: "This is my life's mission and I will continue it as long as I can... Together we will continue to pursue Zionism. We will build, develop, fight, and win."
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that an "occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Since Israel conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and Syria's Golan Heights in 1967, Israeli settlement population has increased exponentially from around 1,500 colonists in 1970 to roughly 140,000 at the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993—under which Israel agreed to halt new settlement activity—to more than 500,000 today.
Settlers often destroy property and attack Palestinians, sometimes en masse in deadly pogroms, in order to terrorize them into leaving so their land can be stolen. As the world's attention is focused on Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 500 Palestinians in the West Bank since October, including at least 143 children, according to the United Nations Children's Fund.
Last month, the International Court of Justice—where Israel is on trial for genocide over its conduct in the Gaza war—ruled that Israel's 57-year occupation is an illegal form of apartheid that must end "as rapidly as possible."
The Gaza war, in which Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 143,000 Palestinians, forcibly displaced almost all of the territory's 2.3 million people, starved hundreds of thousands of people—some of them to death—and flattened much of the coastal enclave, has also pushed numerous nations to recognize Palestinian statehood. Around 150 countries now support Palestinian independence. In April, the United States vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution on Palestinian U.N. membership.
Smotrich applauded the resolution's defeat. The finance minister has come under fire recently for
defending Israeli soldiers accused of gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman torture prison—he called the suspects "heroic warriors"—and for asserting that it would be "justified and moral" for Israel to starve 2 million Palestinians to death.
The Israeli activist group Peace Now decried the recent decision by the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) to establish a new Settlement Administration under Smotrich's authority.
"Netanyahu and Smotrich are relentlessly advancing de facto annexation," Peace Now said Wednesday. "This reckless pursuit will have dire consequences for everyone. The new settlement at Nahal Heletz will create an isolated enclave deep within Palestinian territory, inevitably escalating friction and security challenges."
"This administration is wholly dedicated to advancing the settlement enterprise while completely neglecting the needs of both Israelis and Palestinians," the group added. "This government must be held accountable and replaced—now."
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