The United Nations has ramped up pressure on Israel by issuing a raft of reports in which it formally accuses the Jewish State of committing war crimes during its 23-day war in the Gaza Strip.
Among the most damning allegations, compiled by nine UN human rights experts, is a report that IDF soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield after coming under sniper fire in Tel al-Hawa.
The investigators also accused Israel of targeting civilians in an effort to minimise troop casualties, echoing recent accounts from several soldiers which suggested that civilian lives were taken wantonly.
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN secretary general's special representative for children and armed conflict, said violations occurred on a "daily basis".
The Sri Lankan human rights lawyer, who visited the region in early February, said that her 43-page report listed "just a few examples of the hundreds of incidents that have been documented and verified" by UN officials.
Among them was the January 15 event involving an 11-year-old boy, whom troops ordered to walk in front of them for hours after coming under fire during a house-to-house search in Tel al-Hawa. The child was then made to open Palestinian bags, for fear of them containing explosives.
Other alleged violations include deliberately targeting Palestinian children; shelling a building that civilians had been ordered into just one day previously; and bulldozing a home with a woman and child still inside.
Tzvika Fogel, a reserve brigadier general in the Israeli army, admitted to Reuters that the tactics resulted in unwarranted Palestinian deaths. "If you want to know whether I think that in doing so we killed innocents, the answer is, unequivocally, yes," he told the news agency.
That cavalier attitude echoed IDF accounts published last week, in which several soldiers admitted targeting unarmed civilians and spoke of Palestinian lives being "much less important" than their own.
The UN's damning report also comes on the same day as Physicians for Human Rights accused Israel of violating medical ethics in Gaza.
"Israel placed numerous obstacles in the course of the operation that impeded emergency medical evacuation of the sick and wounded and also caused families to be trapped for days without food, water and medications," it said, adding that such measures "blatantly violated codes of ethics".
In spite of the unrelenting wave of criticism, however, the report's findings are unlikely to strike a chord with many Israelis, coming just one day after police foiled a major terrorist attack in the north of the country.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that a "huge disaster" was narrowly averted on Sunday when a car laden with 100 kg of explosives was placed in Haifa's Lev Hamifratz shopping mall, but failed to detonate.
"We can compare the potential blast to 15 suicide bombers exploding at once," police sapper Yossi Malka told Ha'aretz.
Large-scale terror attacks were commonplace in Israel as the second Palestinian intifada gathered steam, but they tailed off after progress was made in the construction of an eight-metre wall encircling the West Bank.
Over the past two years there have been just two suicide bombings in Israel, killing a total of four people. The UN says 1,400 Palestinians died in the Gaza war, including 431 children and 114 women.
what a mess...
Posted by: Zu | March 24, 2009 at 03:07 PM
These kinds of incidents occur when neither side in this conflict believes the other side has a right to live. When killing cockroaches or rats, does anybody really care if the young are killed? No, when exterminating something, the young are a good target. Jews and Palestinians are practicing Mutually Assured Genocide. It's not a matter of good guys vs bad guys, but bad guys vs bad guys, with the winner being the guys with the biggest guns; Israel. I am very much against the continuing U.S. support for Israel right or wrong. The millions of dollars we send them every year should have conditions of humane behavior attached.
Posted by: Jonathan Bert | March 24, 2009 at 07:31 PM
War is hell and innocent people die and unfortunately that is a fact of life. Do I trust UN "experts" and their stories as fact? No. Could at least some these stories be true? Yes. The X factor of human nature will always allow the worst to emerge. The fact that Israel, for the most part, tries to avoid collator damage and whereas Hamas terrorists target whomever they can kill says a lot. I am still waiting for a comprehensive U.N. report on the war crimes of the true terrorists. Martin, I do respect the fact that you write about the facts as they are reported and not as how you see them. I think I know how you lean just from our correspondence, but the fact that you report and let the reader decide says a lot about you. Thanks for your work!
Posted by: Casey Brown-Myers | March 25, 2009 at 04:00 AM
Here we go again, the UN sailing under it's anti-Israel colours. We've heard the rhetoric now let's see the proof. And while we're about it let's give the report some much needed balance by listing the atrocities committed by Hamas shall we?
Posted by: Lynne (weirdvis) | March 25, 2009 at 01:35 PM