Jerusalem - Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during the
Gaza war last winter, Amnesty International said Thursday in its
first comprehensive report on the 22-day conflict.
The London-based human rights groups called for an international
arms embargo on both Israel and the radical Islamist Palestinian
movement ruling the coastal enclave.
The 117-page report called the scale and intensity of Israel's
attacks on the Gaza Strip during the three-week air and ground
offensive 'unprecedented.'
Hundreds of unarmed civilians, among them about 300 children, were
among the some 1,400 Palestinians killed in the war, according to the
report.
More than 3,000 homes were destroyed and some 20,000 damaged in
Israeli attacks which reduced several entire Gaza neighbourhoods to
rubble. Amnesty said most of the damage was 'wanton.'
Donatella Rovera, who headed an Amnesty field research mission to
Gaza and southern Israel during and after the conflict, slammed
Israel for trying to avoid accountability.
The country failed to properly investigate the conduct of its own
forces and was also refusing to cooperate with the United Nations
fact-finding mission headed by war crimes prosecutor Richard
Goldstone, who Israel charges was mandated by the what it sees as
biased UN Human Rights Council.
Rovera urged the international community to 'use all its leverage'
to pressure Israel into cooperating with the Goldstone inquiry.
The Amnesty report also noted that Hamas and other armed
Palestinian groups had fired hundreds of rockets into southern Israel
during the war, killing three Israeli civilians, injuring scores and
driving thousands from their homes.
In addition to locally made Qassam rockets, they fired longer-
range Grad-type rockets that were smuggled in via the tunnels under
the Gaza-Egypt border, which reached deeper into Israel and placed
many more Israeli civilians at risk.
'Such unlawful attacks constitute war crimes and are
unacceptable,' Rovera was quoted as saying in a statement to the
media.
'Though less lethal, these attacks, using unguided rockets which
cannot be directed at specific targets, ... cannot be justified under
any circumstance.'
The report, based on evidence gathered by Amnesty delegates,
including a military expert, during field research in January and
February, documents Israel's use of battlefield weapons against a
civilian population trapped in Gaza, with no means of escape.
'The deaths of so many children and other civilians cannot be
dismissed simply as 'collateral damage', as argued by Israel,' said
Rovera. 'Many questions remain to be answered about these attacks and
about the fact that the strikes continued unabated despite the rising
civilian death toll.'
Many, Amnesty said, were killed while in their homes, during
Israel's massive pounding of Gaza from the air, sea and land during
the offensive.
It also noted Israel's use of white phosphorus weapons in densely
populated areas.
The rights group said the Israeli army had not responded to its
repeated requests over the past five months for information on
specific cases detailed in the report and for meetings to discuss the
organization's findings.
The report urged those responsible be held accountable for the
war crimes committed.
Both Israel and Hamas rejected the report as unbalanced.
Israel charged the report failed to mention that its offensive was
the result of nine years of Palestinian rocket attacks on southern
Israel.
It failed to mention Israel's efforts to 'minimize as much as
possible' harm to civilians - by giving out advance warnings of
strikes in leaflets dropped from planes, radio broadcasts, and direct
calls to private cellphones, the Israeli military said in a reaction
emailed to the German Press Agency dpa.
And it failed to acknowledge the use of 'human shields' by
Palestinian fighters, who fired from densely-populated residential
areas and 'deliberately' took cover behind medical, educational,
recreational and religious facilities.
Hamas, for its part, said Amnesty had failed to talk to its
leaders in the Strip, rendering the report 'automatically
unbalanced.'
'Hamas is rejecting all the accusation made against it in the
report,' spokesman Sami Abu Zuchri told a news conference in Gaza
City.
'What is needed after seeing all those images of destruction, is
not to blame Hamas, but to take those murderers (Israel) to court to
sue them, instead of publishing such reports,' he said.
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