Israel: Amnesty report "questionable and objectionable" (Extra)

Jul 2, 2009, 6:04 GMT

   Jerusalem - Israel Thursday rejected Amnesty International's report accusing it of having committed war crimes during its offensive in Gaza last winter.

   Israel slammed the report as biased, because it failed to mention that the Gaza offensive followed years of Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel, nor the Israeli efforts to 'minimize as much as possible' harm to unarmed civilians by giving advance warnings of strikes in leaflets, radio broadcasts, and direct calls to private cellphones.

   The report, Israel charged, also failed to mention the use of 'human shields' by Hamas and other Palestinian militants, who fired their rockets from densely-populated residential areas and used medical, educational, recreational and religious facilities as cover.

   'We find it both questionable and objectionable that a well-respected and ostensibly objective international organization such as Amnesty could produce a report on Operation Cast Lead (the Gaza offensive's code name) without properly recognizing the unbearable reality of nine years of incessant and indiscriminate rocket fire on the citizens of Israel,' the Israeli military said in a reaction emailed to the German Press Agency dpa.

   The report, it charged, 'presents a distorted view of the laws of war that does not comply with the rules implemented by democratic states battling terror.'

   The military said it had 'documented evidence' from aerial drones, ground footage and independent accounts, which 'prove beyond all doubt' that Hamas fighters deliberately fired from behind clinics, schools and mosques.

   The 'unfortunate' incidents in which Palestinian civilians were killed, it insisted, were 'unavoidable' during combat, especially of the type Hamas forced on Israel during the Gaza war, 'when it chose to fight from within civilian population centres.'