Showing posts with label Amnesty International. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amnesty International. Show all posts

1.7.09

Amnesty International: Israel committed war crimes in Gaza

Hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed using high-precision weapons, while others were shot at close range, the group Amnesty International says.

The report says that ''Israeli forces repeatedly breached the laws of war'' (the report you see on the link is not the full report.

UPDATE:
Amnesty International accused Israel and Palestinian militants of war crimes Thursday in the most comprehensive report on the recent Gaza war. Both sides rejected the findings.

Organisations reporting war crimes and human rights abuse have accustomed us now to this false equivalence between Israel and Palestinian organisations without which they cannot condemn Israel unless they condemn the other side, fearing an outcry from Zionist organisations.
First false equivalence: I thought that Hamas being considered anyway a terrorist organisation is not worth the news, while Israel is a 'light unto the nations'.
Second false equivalence: More than 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 900 civilians, were killed during the three-week offensive. Thirteen Israelis were killed.
Third false equivalence: Israel is the occupying entity, Gaza is occupied (the word is even a misstatement since Gaza is not only occupied but under a constant and harsh Israeli siege...
Fourth false equivalence: the Israeli occupation of Palestine has been going on for sixty years now while Palestinian rockets are "the unbearable reality of nine years of incessant and indiscriminate rocket fire on the citizens of Israel" according to an Israeli official, they only killed 11 more Israelis in addition to the thriteen who died during the Gaza December offensive. 544 Israelis died from suicide bombings between 2001 and 2008. So that brings the total of Israeli victims to approximately 568 from both suicide bombings and rockets between 2000 and 2008 while Palestinian victims in Gaza numbered 1400 for the only month of december 2008.

I hate to look at these statistics because every human life is unique but we have to do it when we are to look at these false equivalences...I don't think Jews would have got any sympathy to have a state of their own if they were few to die from Nazi's persecutions. For political purposes, numbers matter, and this is what Amnesty and HRW are missing out when they issue their condemnations. For as long as zionists could maintain this equivalence, nobody can imagine how much pain and suffering is inflicted on Palestinians and how much their situation is dramatic...When the rockets fall silent, settlers return to their homes and their villages but every Israeli incursion into Gaza leaves permanent scars, death, trauma, and tragedies behind at the scale of the population and beyond our imagination...In Gaza, between incursions, there is no return to normal life, there is only a stop on the way down the abyss of the occupation...

Gaza: The legacy of war, and audio slideshow by Peter Beaumont, Antonio Olmos and Jim Powell

Israel imprisoned recently human rights activists from the Free Gaza movement trying to ship aid to Gaza including building material. Listen below to a message from Cynthia McKinney in an Israeli prison calling on president Obama to ease the Israeli blockade of Gaza. This is plainly crime against humanity.


Read here from Informed Comment: 'Piracy at the fourth of July'
 
Since March 29th 2006