Tuesday, June 13, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
As is always the case, Amnesty assumed that ay Israeli actions were war crimes before writing a single word and then fit the facts to their predetermined conclusion.
Amnesty International investigated nine Israeli airstrikes that resulted in the killing of civilians and in the damage and destruction of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip. Three separate attacks on the first night of bombing on 9 May, in which precision-guided bombs targeted three senior Al-Quds Brigades commanders, killed 10 Palestinian civilians, and injured at least 20 others. They were launched into densely populated urban areas at 2am when families were sleeping at home, which suggests that those who planned and authorized the attacks anticipated – and likely disregarded – the disproportionate harm to civilians. Intentionally launching disproportionate attacks, a pattern Amnesty International has documented in previous Israeli operations, is a war crime.The ICRC says
The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks against military objectives which are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.
The legal definition of proportionality demands that the attacker weigh the military advantage of the attack against the expected loss of innocent life. Israel clearly did this: Amnesty admits the targets were senior terrorist commanders, and Amnesty agrees that Israel used precision weapons meant to minimize collateral damage. But even so, it declares the attacks "disproportionate" without a grain of evidence that the military advantage was not great enough.
Of course, Amnesty doesn't have a clue as to the military advantage of killing senior PIJ terrorists. It doesn't even try to quantify that. But that is the entire point of the principle of proportionality to begin with.
Amnesty is saying that any civilian deaths, even when the attack is clearly against significant military targets, are war crimes - and that is exactly the opposite of what international law says.
Ironically, one of the ICRC's main sources for a detailed discussion of proportionality and the difficulty of defining it comes from....the Israeli High Court. Israel has teams of international law experts who approve these kinds of airstrikes. In this case, certainly Israel knew ahead of time - based on huge amounts of intelligence - that civilians were going to be killed, and it determined that this was a necessary but unfortunate consequence of defending itself legally. Amnesty, with next to no information about the military targets, breezily declares them not to be very important.
As a reminder, the international law standard on what is proportionate allows far, far more dead civilians for far less military advantage.
Amnesty's obsessive hate for Israel and willful ignorance of international law doesn't end there. It describes an airstrike that destroyed a building but didn't hurt anyone:
Israel’s deliberate destruction of civilian homes also took a heavy toll on civilians in the Gaza Strip, including on people living with disabilities.On 13 May, Israeli forces targeted a four-storey building in the Jabalia refugee camp. The building was home to 42 people from the extended Nabhan family. Five members of the family live with disabilities, including three being wheelchair users.Hussam Nabhan, an eyewitness to the attack, told Amnesty International he had received a call he believed to be from an Israeli intelligence officer at around 6pm, saying residents of the building had 15 minutes to evacuate. Hussam told the caller that there were people with disabilities in the building and they needed more time, but the caller just repeated the warning.After the strike, 22-year-old Haneen Nabhan was so traumatized she found it hard to talk, saying that her wheelchair had been buried under the rubble of her home so she could no longer move around independently.Research by Amnesty International found no evidence that the Nabhan building – and other residential buildings destroyed or damaged during the last two days of the offensive – had been used to store weapons or any other military equipment or that rockets had been launched from their direct vicinity.“The root cause of this unspeakable violence is Israel’s system of apartheid. This system must be dismantled, the blockade of the Gaza Strip immediately lifted, and those responsible for the crime of apartheid, war crimes and other crimes under international law must be held to account,” said Morayef.
The bias here is undeniable. According to Amnesty, Israel - for no reason whatsoever - targeted a building filled with disabled people, and ensured that it was empty before attacking.
This is a blood libel.
Israel has an extensive methodology for determining valid military targets. Only the most rabid antisemite would claim that Israel went through all the effort - determining a target, warning residents, choosing the appropriate weapons - just to make civilian lives miserable. And only Amnesty International is so self-righteous to assume that their parachuting in and talking to a few residents who are frightened of Hamas is enough of an investigation to determine that the targeted buildings had no military value.
An expert on the laws of armed conflict states, accurately:
For commission of a war crime, a culpable state of mind is an essential element. Article 8 of the ICC’s Rome Statute requires a showing of either intent to harm civilians or recklessness: ordering an attack with the knowledge that the resulting harm to civilians would be “clearly excessive in relation to the … military advantage anticipated.” The high threshold for proof of a culpable state of mind is no accident. Rather, it is a recognition that a less demanding test would not adequately acknowledge the risk of harm that inevitably flows from the fog of war.
Amnesty is not interpreting international law. It is twisting international law to damn Israel - without any evidence whatsoever that Israeli actions were reckless or meant to intentionally harm civilians.
We've come to expect such libels from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, but it is important to call it out each time. Because the pattern of ignoring facts, and blaming Israel for war crimes that all evidence proves otherwise, and of determining the outcome of the faux "investigations" before they even occur - this pattern proves that these NGOs are not interested in the truth, in international law or even in human rights.
Their entire aim is to demonize Israel.
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