Amnesty: Israel, Hamas committed war crimes during Gaza war (Roundup)

Jul 2, 2009, 9:47 GMT

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.