Global Pulse Blog

Following up on a previous post, the Guardian newspaper, in an explosive article, has compiled “detailed evidence of alleged war crimes committed by Israel during the 23-day offensive in the Gaza Strip earlier this year, involving the use of Palestinian children as human shields and the targeting of medics and hospitals”.

It also has produced 3 documentaries detailing their investigation. Be sure to watch them all:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy6-FZz69lE]

Part 1 deals with  deals with the allegations of using children as human shields by the Israeli army.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2UuQ8V5DvY&feature=channel]

Part 2 deals with the targeting of medics and medical facilities. According to the World Health Organization, more than half of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 44 clinics were damaged by Israeli bombs.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ToZTtGOr0k&feature=channel]

Part 3 deals with drones targeting civilians.

In a report from March 23, Physicians for Human Rights Israel mentions:

there was “certainty” that Israel violated international humanitarian law during the three-week war in January, with attacks on medics, damage to medical buildings, indiscriminate attacks on civilians and delays in medical treatment for the injured.

“We have noticed a stark decline in IDF morals concerning the Palestinian population of Gaza, which in reality amounts to a contempt for Palestinian lives,” said Dani Filc, chairman of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. The Guardian gathered testimony on missile attacks by Israeli drones against clearly distinguishable civilian targets. In one case a family of six was killed when a missile hit the courtyard of their house. Israel has not admitted using drones but experts say their optical equipment is good enough to identify individual items of clothing worn by targets. The Geneva convention makes it clear medical staff and hospitals are not legitimate targets and forbids involuntary human shields.“

From the Times UK:

The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to “cold-blooded murder”.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights released the names of 1,417 Gazans that it says were killed in the war, saying that 926 were civilians. The Israeli Government contends that most of those killed were combatants or legitimate targets.

According the article:

The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.

“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.

The BBC has covered this as well.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rPO1v3Uc1c]

To some, “collateral damage” is just a by-product of war, or at least what we tell ourselves in order to somehow justify the loss of innocent civilians. However, what if there is another reason for this violence? What if harming others, in this case Palestinians, is indirectly encouraged? Some Israeli soldiers spoke to Haaretz about their experiences. Even more troubling is an article published 4 days ago, which documents how graduating Israeli soldiers design special shirts to commemorate the occasion.

From the article:

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques – these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription “Better use Durex,” next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, “1 shot, 2 kills.” A “graduation” shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, “No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it.“ 

A couple of days ago, I read the headline: Arab Countries Have Not Delivered Pledged $1B to Rebuild Gaza, and was dismayed at the explanation:

A senior Arab League official says Arab countries have not delivered any of the more than $1 billion they pledged to rebuild Gaza after Israel’s devastating offensive. The official says the money pledged in mid-January has been held up because of disagreements between rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas about who should receive donations.

Here is today’s headline: U.S. offers $900 million to Palestinians. According to the article:

“Only by acting now can we turn this crisis into an opportunity that moves us closer to our shared goals,” Clinton said at a Gaza donors conference hosted by Egypt in the Red Sea resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh.

“By providing humanitarian assistance to Gaza, we also aim to foster conditions in which a Palestinian state can be fully realized.”

She said the U.S. aid package — which must be approved by Congress — has been “designed in coordination with the Palestinian Authority” to make sure the money “does not end up in the wrong hands.”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is difficult to explain, and divisive to discuss, but one thing is clear – playing politics and delaying diplomacy does not help the victims on both sides of the conflict.

The world has been watching in horror at the senseless violence in Palestine.

Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician, was interviewed by CBS news, and his account is chilling – thousands wounded, more than half are women and children, with horrifying wounds. Amputation and strange injuries are the norm. As he says, this is open war on a population that cannot flee… bombing people in a cage.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev6ojm62qwA&eurl=http://www.juancole.com/2009/01/its-hell-in-here-they-are-bombing-15.html]

Then we have the destruction of two U.N. Gaza schools:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL2vh_eT4_s&eurl=http://crooksandliars.com/node?page=1]

And then we had a truce that lasted all of 15 minutes – suspending conflict to allow humanitarian relief, then kicking the people out to start the conflict again.

Now, we have more horror stories with the finding of 70 Palestinian corpses near a bombed out house and the International Red Cross finding 4 weak children alongside their dead mothers.