From: Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
*Testimony 1: Carnage at Al-Fakhoura School, Jabalia. *
“I was working at the [Kamal Edwan] Hospital here in Jabalia, when the ambulances arrived with the dead and injured from Al-Fakhoura school. Most of the dead were women and children, and most of the survivors had terrible shrapnel wounds. We had to turn the maternity ward into a surgical theatre so that we could try to save more lives.”
Ayman Al-Majdalawi is a nurse from Jabalia in the Northern Gaza Strip. Yesterday, January 6, he was on duty at Kamal Edwan hospital when the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) fired four artillery shells towards nearby Al-Fakhoura school. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) had just transformed the school into a temporary shelter for dozens of local families, who, like thousands of other local residents, had been driven out of their homes by the IOF’s continuing military onslaught. One of the four artillery shells struck the house of Samir Deeb, instantly killing him, his wife, three of his children, five of his brother’s children and two female relatives. The other three artillery shells exploded next to Al-Fakhoura school, causing carnage in and around the crowded school. Twenty seven civilians were killed instantly, and more than fifty injured. Women, men and children had limbs torn from their bodies by the force of the explosions.
“The ambulance drivers told me the Israelis were shooting at them as they were trying to evacuate the dead and injured” says Ayman Al-Majdalawi. “When the ambulances arrived at Kamal Edwan, there was chaos. This is a small hospital, and we were trying to save as many people as we could – but a lot of them had already lost arms or legs, and they were bleeding heavily. It was horrific.”
Under customary international law, it is illegal to target civilian objects, including schools, hospitals and United Nations facilities. IOF claimed Al-Fakhoura school was targeted because Hamas militants had fired [at IOF] from the school. However, under customary international law, an attacking force is obliged to take the necessary precautions to protect the civilian population against the dangers resulting from military operations. Given the densely-populated, residential nature of
the area surrounding the school, an artillery attack in the vicinity could reasonably be expected to cause excessive civilian casualties. As John Ging, UNRWA Director of Operations in the Gaza Strip noted “it was entirely inevitable if artillery shells landed in that area there would be a high number of casualties.”
John Ging also stated that his agency had provided the Israelis with exact geographical coordinates of all UN facilities in Gaza, including Al-Fakhoura school. He refuted IOF claims that Hamas gunmen had fired at them from the school. “I can tell you categorically that there was no military activity in that school at the time of the tragedy” he said. “They were innocent people.”
Since the Israeli Occupation Forces unleashed ‘Operation Cast Lead’ on December 27, 2008, at least 682 Palestinians have been killed inside the Gaza Strip, including at least 158 children and 41 women. Another 2,950 adults and children have been maimed and injured, leaving Gaza hospitals
at the brink of total collapse. Israeli war planes and tanks are indiscriminately bombing and shelling civilian houses and facilities across the entire Gaza Strip, whilst heavily armed IOF troops shoot to
kill on the streets.
Hundreds of thousands of Gazan families are trapped inside their homes, without electricity water or adequate food, terrified of being killed, or buried alive. Meanwhile medical staff like Ayman Al-Majdalawi are risking their lives to reach, and rescue, the dead and injured. “No-where in Gaza safe” he says. “Our ambulances are in danger, and some of the injured people have bled to death because we couldn’t reach them. I try to go to other hospitals if I am needed, but it is very dangerous, and like everyone else, we are very frightened.”
From Times online: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article5488380.ece
ISRAEL has sought to justify its military attacks on Gaza by stating that it amounts to an act of “self-defence” as recognised by Article 51, United Nations Charter. We categorically reject this contention.
The rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas deplorable as they are, do not, in terms of scale and effect amount to an armed attack entitling Israel to rely on self-defence. Under international law self-defence is an act of last resort and is subject to the customary rules of proportionality and necessity.
The killing of almost 800 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and more than 3,000 injuries, accompanied by the destruction of schools, mosques, houses, UN compounds and government buildings, which Israel has a responsibility to protect under the Fourth Geneva Convention, is not commensurate to the deaths caused by Hamas rocket fire.
For 18 months Israel had imposed an unlawful blockade on the coastal strip that brought Gazan society to the brink of collapse. In the three years after Israel’s redeployment from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. And yet in 2005-8, according to the UN, the Israeli army killed about 1,250 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children. Throughout this time the Gaza Strip remained occupied territory under international law because Israel maintained effective control over it.
Israel’s actions amount to aggression, not self-defence, not least because its assault on Gaza was unnecessary. Israel could have agreed to renew the truce with Hamas. Instead it killed 225 Palestinians on the first day of its attack. As things stand, its invasion and bombardment of Gaza amounts to collective punishment of Gaza’s 1.5m inhabitants contrary to international humanitarian and human rights law. In addition, the blockade of humanitarian relief, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and preventing access to basic necessities such as food and fuel, are prima facie war crimes.
We condemn the firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel and suicide bombings which are also contrary to international humanitarian law and are war crimes. Israel has a right to take reasonable and proportionate means to protect its civilian population from such attacks. However, the manner and scale of its operations in Gaza amount to an act of aggression and is contrary to international law, notwithstanding the rocket attacks by Hamas.
Ian Brownlie QC, Blackstone Chambers
Mark Muller QC, Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales
Michael Mansfield QC and Joel Bennathan QC, Tooks Chambers
Sir Geoffrey Bindman, University College, London
Professor Richard Falk, Princeton University
Professor M Cherif Bassiouni, DePaul University, Chicago
Professor Christine Chinkin, LSE
Professor John B Quigley, Ohio State University
Professor Iain Scobbie and Victor Kattan, School of Oriental and African Studies
Professor Vera Gowlland-Debbas, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
Professor Said Mahmoudi, Stockholm University
Professor Max du Plessis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban
Professor Bill Bowring, Birkbeck College
Professor Joshua Castellino, Middlesex University
Professor Thomas Skouteris and Professor Michael Kagan, American University of Cairo
Professor Javaid Rehman, Brunel University
Daniel Machover, Chairman, Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights
Dr Phoebe Okawa, Queen Mary University
John Strawson, University of East London
Dr Nisrine Abiad, British Institute of International and Comparative Law
Dr Michael Kearney, University of York
Dr Shane Darcy, National University of Ireland, Galway
Dr Michelle Burgis, University of St Andrews
Dr Niaz Shah, University of Hull
Naomi Klein
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009
Article history
It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”. The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause – even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves … This international backing must stop.”
Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can’t go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren’t good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.
Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.
The world has tried what used to be called “constructive engagement”. It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures – quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel’s exports of processed food. And in December European ministers “upgraded” the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don’t work, sticks are needed.
Israel is not South Africa.
Of course it isn’t. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was “infinitely worse than apartheid”. That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.
Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.
Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.
This one I’ll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus’s work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.
Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.
Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don’t I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel’s Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: “As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company.”
Ramsey says his decision wasn’t political; he just didn’t want to lose customers. “We can’t afford to lose any of our clients,” he explains, “so it was purely commercially defensive.”
It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it’s precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.
Comments are presently closed on this article. It will be open to comment from approximately 09:00.
A version of this column was published in the Nation (thenation.com)
By Luisa Morgantini, the Vice President of the European Parliament, and the Confederal Group of the European United Left – Nordic Green Left
12 January 2009 – Issue : 816
More than 700 Palestinian people killed, including 220 children in less than two weeks of Cast Lead operation actuated by the Israeli Forces against the Gaza Strip. That means against civil inhabitants, about one million and a half collectively punished by the ongoing Israeli bombing attacks and already devastated by a total and inhuman siege lasting several months. Where has humanity gone if this can happen today under our eyes without being able to do anything to stop this massacre, to protect all civilians, to defend human rights and dignity?
Qassam rockets against Israeli civilians are a crime, but the blockade of the Strip leading to an enormous and unprecedented humanitarian crisis is a crime too: about 290 Palestinians patients died since June 2007 unable to leave the Strip due to the closure imposed by Israel. Amongst these deaths, 35 percent are children. Now, adding to al this, by air, by land and by sea the Gazans are attacked by fire.
Homes, entire buildings, ministries, schools, pharmacies and police stations gutted. Children terrified, hospitals collapsed, medicines nowhere to be found. The Shifa hospital in Gaza city has appealed to the concerned international parties to supply the hospital with morgue fridge units after all its units were crammed with the growing number of bodies. The situation is unbearable. Nothing and nobody are safe from the bombings, also one UNRWA school has been hit killing 45 people in a bash, and no militants were inside shooting rockets, but only refugees and homeless civilians.
Israel is today -more than ever- an unpunished power that can freely break not only International law, but also abuse all human rights for “security reasons.” And we, the International Community and the Quartet, including the EU, have permitted this with our silence, with our negligence that means complicity. Yes, as the European Union, we did a lot to support economically the Palestinians, but they need freedom and independence. Since 1967, Israel has militarily occupied the Palestinian territories: a brutal and colonial occupation. The theft of land; the demolition of houses; checkpoints where Palestinians are treated with contempt, beaten, humiliated; colonies that grow alarmingly, taking over land and water resources, destroying crops. Thousands of political prisoners, who are even denied visits by family members.
STOP IT
We have permitted all this, not being able to say to the Israeli Governments “enough with the impunity, respect legality and human rights, respect the peace negotiations with concrete facts: Stop the occupation, Stop the Settlements, Stop the Gaza Siege”. Europe recognised the necessity of the creation of two States for two people living side-by-side in peace and security but since now it was not consequent and coherent in implementing this essential goal, opting for an assistance policy instead of a political solution. Aid not justice: exactly the opposite of what Palestinians, but also Israelis and the peace need.
Furthermore, the EU didn’t help the dialogue between Fatah and Hamas: it was a big mistake not to recognise the government democratically elected by the Palestinian people, and even more not to recognise the unity government which came out by the effort of the Palestinian prisoners belonging to all the factions, first of all by Marwan Barghouti. We should have helped Hamas to work on a democratic system and to fight the occupation through the non violent resistance. For this, the EU should ask forgiveness to all the victims – Palestinian, Israelis, Lebanese – of this endless tragedy.
Of course, also the Palestinian leadership has their responsibilities: the division between Hamas and Fatah have been paid in Gaza and in West Bank by civilians who are now suffering also for the responsibility of the leaderships who are not able to find a stable solution for their unity. And surely Hamas also must assume its responsibilities: launching rockets, generating fear and representing a threat against the Israeli civilian population represents unlawful and criminal actions that are to be condemned and stopped.
One death is enough to condemn all violence but we must recognise the asymmetry: since 2002, 20 people have been killed in rocket attacks by Palestinian extremists – too many – but at the same time more than 3,000 Gazans have been killed, including hundreds of children. On the other side, Israeli policies have never truly prevent the radicalisation of the conflict by giving a concrete signal of its will of peace nor showing the commitment to achieve a just and shared agreement that would be sustainable and lasting in all the region, and this is the main risk for the State of Israel.
We saw it with the recent pogrom by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in Hebron, a ghost city where 120,000 Palestinians people live as hostages of 500 or 600 Israeli settlers protected by thousands of soldiers and paramilitary forces, where more than 800 Palestinian shops were forced to close because of aggressions and where, after years of complicity, backing, connivance by the different governments succeeded at the Head of the State of Israel carrying on a colonial policy the Israeli settlers’ violence exploded attacking Palestinians, uprooting trees, burning homes and mosques.
WHEN WILL IT END?
The ongoing war in Gaza is only the last signal of arrogance by Israeli policies and leadership unable or not interested to be farseeing in the way of peace: the risks of fuel the conflict, expanding it to the whole area is tangible now, since news already reports about at least two Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon towards northern Israel, with the suddenly Israel response by shelling Lebanese lands.
And the price is and will be always paid by innocents, compelled into a never-ending slaughter under the bombs and probably also targeted by unconventional weapons: Israel admitted the use of white phosphorus bombs during war in Lebanon, weapons that causes very painful and often lethal chemical burns, and it is not excluded – as many medical witnesses reported from Gazan hospitals- that they are employed also for the Gaza War, together with Depleted Uranium or Dime (dense inert metal explosive) weapons made with tungsten, the victims might also die from cancers due to the toxicity of tungsten. A complete destruction.
Thinking of this and to all the victim of this unjustified and illogical violence, the three hours of lull for a “humanitarian corridor” in the Strip sounds like adding insult to injury, to the butchery, as well as the choice of the official name of this war, “Cast Lead,” two words from a children’s song about a Hanukkah toy. Humanitarian NGOs call on Israel, Hamas and Palestinian armed groups to observe a full humanitarian truce to respond to the needs of the beleaguered civilian population, since a truce that lasts for a few hours a day is simply insufficient, too short to address the urgent and massive needs of the civilians suffering heavy casualties, often used as human shields, a practice prohibited under the Geneva Conventions and that according to Amnesty International is widely used by both sides of the conflict.
My Israeli friends and peace activists now demonstrating against the war and the siege on Gaza, the same people who since many years, day after day, have been repeating that the logical conclusion for an Israeli government seeking peace would have been to make concessions, ending of the occupation, signing of a peace treaty, foundation of the State of Palestine, withdrawal to the 1967 borders, a reasonable solution of the refugee problem, release of all Palestinian prisoners, say today that “logic has little influence on politics” and I completely agree.
People often have more gumption than their representatives and each time I go to Palestine and Israel accompanying delegations of MEPs or people of civil society I can meet many extraordinary Israelis and Palestinians struggling together in a non-violent way against the occupation and for rights and dignity for all, representing a culture able to destroy the figure of the enemy and revenge, where everybody loses.
They are a miracle in that consolidated context of humiliation and reiterated human rights abuses. A miracle that the ongoing war, the impunity of Israel helped by the silence of the International Community risk to destroy tragically together with all hopes of peace. Israel cannot search for security by creating instability and injustice, cannot search peace fuelling the hate and this not only among Palestinians, also civil society in moderate Arab countries are concerned in this escalating conflict: the world entire would be more insecure.
The International community bears the responsibility of not having the will to stop Israel. We should impose a ceasefire and send International forces to protect civilians. Border crossings in the Strip must be opened to the humanitarian aid and goods, in Rafah must come back International forces, including Arabs and Europeans, to control the entrance and exit. The EU should also tell to Israel that we cannot upgrade cooperation or relations unless it stops the bombing and massacre of Palestinian population in Gaza and stop to build settlement in the West Bank. Occupation, violence, suffering, injustice and the lack of freedom lead to indelible and disastrous consequences on the population. We should help to grow and rise the voices and the forces that in Israel are struggling for peace and say we refuse to be enemies, end the occupation.
luisa.morgantini@europarl.europa.eu
www.luisamorgantini.net