Israel’s ‘Legitimate’ Genocide

The government of Israel released a report on Sunday in which it is stated that the Army acted in a “legitimate” way and did not intend to “cause intentional damage” to civilians in the Gaza war of 2014. This results of the internal investigation was published before the Human Rights Council of the United Nations makes public its findings on the war Israel waged against Gaza last year, in which, Palestinians argue, the Jewish state committed war crimes. Israel has not agreed to cooperate with UN investigators, as it happened after the conflict recorded between 2008 and 2009 in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military was eventually indicted for war crimes by the UNHRC. “The damage to civilians was the result of the unfortunate side effects of legal, though a legitimate military action carried out in the vicinity of civilian areas, and as a result of decisions of some controls that are not infallible, about intelligence services that are not perfect and technological systems that sometimes fail,” says the document released Sunday by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shortly after the weekly meeting of the Cabinet. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of hiding behind civilians deliberately and of operating in the most populated area of the Gaza Strip. “Those are baseless accusations against the State of Israel and we are not going to waste time reading the report of the Commission [on Human Rights] UN,” said Netanyahu. “We will continue will protect our soldiers, and they will continue protecting us,” he said. The UN counted 2,256 Palestinians killed in Gaza, of whom 1,563 were civilians, and 73 dead Israelis -including six non-combatants- in the conflict that raged for 50 days between July and August last year, the longest since the so-called War of Independence of Israel (1948-1948) and that caused more civilian casualties since the Six-Day War of 1967. The report released Sunday by Israel maintains that only a third of the Palestinian victims were civilians, believing that many fighters in Gaza were not identified correctly. The paper considers that the attacks were “legitimate and on military targets under civilian guise” in the most contentious cases. A Hamas spokesman quoted by Reuters said the Israeli report was not valid: “War crimes from Israel are evident and were committed before the cameras of international media.” The source of the Islamic resistance movement said their militias were limited to protecting the population of Gaza. An earlier internal UN report stated, however, that Palestinian armed groups set up ammunition depots and rocket launchers in UN schools in Gaza that were empty at the time of the conflict last summer. Palestinian officials have also asked the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories since last April 1, to open proceedings to determine whether war crimes occurred during the conflict last summer. A spokesman for the Palestinian government in Ramallah said that the report issued by Israel on Gaza “will not change the Palestinian position to demand an international investigation” into the Gaza war. The Israeli military court closed without charges the criminal investigation that had been opened by the death of four children aged between 9 and 11 years of age on a beach during the conflict last summer. The military prosecutor acquitted airmen who fired the missiles that ended their lives because they had “confused” children with Hamas militants. Read the rest below at the source link