Mar
20
Israel confronted with horrors of Gaza offensive
Filed Under Gaza
Israeli soldiers shot and killed Palestinian civilians at random during the offensive in the Gaza Strip. Such were the revelations that emerged at a military academy meeting, where veterans of the offensive unburdened their consciences. The information that leaked out echoes the horrific accounts that Palestinians gave to RNW correspondent David Poort.
The transcripts of the soldiers’ statements were leaked to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where excerpts of the text were published. The conclusion that the soldiers were permitted to shoot at anything that moved, including civilians, has sparked an outcry.
The soldiers’ confessions echo the eyewitness accounts I heard from Palestinians shortly after the Gaza offensive. Many of those accounts have not yet been published because they could not be verified by other sources. They were often so incredibly horrific that a journalist was powerless to act on them without independent corroboration.
Khalid’s story
For example, shortly after the conflict I came across Khalid Abed Rabbo, a policeman from Gaza City. He was in tears, sitting among the ruins of his apartment block on the edge of the Jabaliya refugee camp. Khalid explained that, on 7 January, his home was at the centre of the conflict in the Gaza Strip. Israeli tanks had surrounded the neighbourhood following heavy fighting with Hamas gunmen.
Through a megaphone, Israeli soldiers ordered the Rabbo family to come outside. Khalid then described how two of his daughters, seven-year-old Souad and two-year-old Amal, were gunned down in cold blood by an Israeli soldier. His third daughter Samar, aged four, was critically injured and taken to hospital. To my enormous frustration, I was unable to use the story, due to a lack of independent sources. At the time, it was unthinkable that similar accounts would emerge from the mouths of Israeli soldiers themselves.
Eyewitness accounts
The soldiers’ eyewitness accounts conjure up images that Israel would rather not see: images of Israeli soldiers treating the people of the Gaza Strip like animals and deliberately destroying their possessions. “The lives of the Palestinians were much less important than the lives of our soldiers,” declared one soldier at the meeting.
During the 22-day offensive in the Gaza Strip, over 1,300 Palestinians died, many of them civilians. The death toll on the side of the Israelis was 13. The military protocol on shooting civilians was vaguely worded and even those rules were not complied with. Particularly during house-to-house combat, shots rang out without warning. “Doors were kicked in and we immediately started firing, floor after floor,” recounted one of the servicemen.
Cold-blooded murder
Khalid’s story from Jabaliya is nowhere to be found in the accounts of the soldiers. But they do reveal a number of other specific abuses. One soldier tells how a member of his platoon was given the order to shoot an elderly Palestinian woman. “It was cold-blooded murder,” he says.
Another soldier tells of an incident in which a woman and her two children were killed by an Israeli sniper. “We had occupied a house while the Palestinian family was still inside. They were locked in a room. When another platoon arrived, we wanted to leave. A sniper post was set up on the roof,” the soldier explained.
“When the family was released, the platoon commander ordered them to go right on leaving the house. One of the mothers misunderstood and turned left with her two children. No one had informed the sniper on the roof about the release and he did what he was ordered to do … he shot and killed the woman and the children.”
Vandalism
Large-scale vandalism also features in the testimonies of the soldiers who fought in the Gaza Strip. The outskirts of the Jabaliya refugee camp and the town of Beit Hanoun were particularly badly hit. If a house was spared at all, its contents were thrown out into the street. In the border region between Israel and the Gaza Strip, almost all of the buildings in industrial zones were destroyed.
Investigation
In response to the soldiers’ revelations, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak expressed his confidence in the investigation that the army has launched into the offensive. So far, that investigation has produced nothing in the way of results. The Israeli government’s viewpoint is that Hamas is ultimately responsible for the civilian deaths because its militants were operating in densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip. “We have the most moral army in the world,” insisted Mr. Barak in an interview with Israeli radio.
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