Showing posts with label LOAC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LOAC. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 13, 2023



Amnesty released a quite predictable report on the mini-war in Gaza last month. 

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. 






Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Sunday, November 14, 2021




JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security in America, created a Gaza Task Force to go to Israel and report on what they found out about the Gaza conflict last May. 

The members of the task force are:

LTG Robert Ashley, USA (ret.), Former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency 
LTG John M. Bednarek, USA (ret.), Former Senior Defense Official in Iraq; former Chief of Office of Security Cooperation in Baghdad 
LTC Geoffrey S. Corn, USA (ret.) Former Chief International Law for U.S. Army Europe 
Lt Gen Jon Davis, USMC (ret.) Former Deputy Commandant for Aviation 
LTG Karen Gibson, USA (ret.) Former Deputy Director for National Intelligence for National Security Partnerships 
LTG Stephen Lanza, USA (ret.) Former Commanding General of I Corps and Joint Base Lewis McChord
 RADM Brian Losey, USN (ret.) Former Commander of Naval Special Warfare Command 
Lt Gen Richard Natonski, USMC (ret.) Former Commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces Command 
LTG Raymond Palumbo, USA (ret.) Former Deputy Commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Command 
GEN David Rodriguez, USA (ret.) Former Commander of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) 
Lt Gen Thomas Trask, USAF (ret.) Former Vice Commander of United States Special Operations Command 
Gen Charles Wald, USAF (ret.) Former Deputy Commander of United States European Command (EUCOM)
I'd say that this group has orders of magnitude more expertise in the laws of armed conflict than the entire staffs of Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the UN Human Rights Council and Oxfam combined.

They released their report last month, with nearly no coverage in the media. And no wonder: they prove that the media and the NGOs they adore have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to international law.

The report does not only discuss what Israel did right. It also expands on Israel's missteps, mostly with messaging (the bombing of the Al Jalaa media building and the apparent deception to the world media that a ground operation was starting, for two.) It describes how Hamas learned lessons from previous wars and how they attempted to gain specific advantages. It discusses what lessons other democracies can learn from how Israel fought terrorists who are willing to make their own people human shields.

The report emphasizes how Hamas and its allies used the media to spread lies about the laws of armed conflict. Two examples of egregious ignorance about the laws of war from two popular comedy news hosts are given:

Trevor Noah, The Daily Show 
On May 11, 2021, Trevor Noah did a segment on The Daily Show in which he argued that, because Israel is more militarily capable, it should refrain from defending itself: “If you were in a fight where the other person cannot beat you, how hard should you retaliate when they try to hurt you?”
 John Oliver, Last Week Tonight 
Oliver’s viral May 16, 2021, segment about Israeli actions included the unfounded accusation that it “targeted the al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan,” and that the IDF’s strike on a multi-story building in Gaza used by Hamas “sure seems like war crime, regardless of whether you send a courtesy heads-up text.” Oliver dismissed Hamas' firing of rockets at Israeli civilian population centers because “most of the rockets aimed toward Israeli citizens this week were intercepted.”

Both of these examples were multiplied, subtly or not, by mainstream media coverage that amplified Hamas' and its supporters' lies that every civilian killed in a war is a war crime. 

Two of the members of the task force wrote an op-ed in the New York Post today that summarized the findings and what it means for America in the future:

In its conflict with Hamas in May, Israel endured a barrage of rockets — as well as war-crime accusations. Iron Dome intercepted most of the former. The latter are more dangerous, for Israel and even the United States.

After reviewing the Israeli Defense Forces’ operations during the Gaza conflict as retired senior US military officers, we find these accusations spurious — fed by Hamas’ disinformation and a widespread misunderstanding of the Law of Armed Conflict, or LOAC. These dynamics could soon feature in conflicts involving the US military.

Delegitimizing Israeli operations — not military victory — was one of Hamas’ main objectives in this conflict. “The real crimes,” Hamas’ spokesperson told the media, “were committed by [Israel] targeting civilians … killing more than 100 children and women and demolishing buildings.”

With such false claims, Hamas casts any civilian casualty as illegal. Unfortunately, many in the media and public embraced this false narrative.

“Destroying a civilian residence sure seems like a war crime,” comedian John Oliver opined on his show. Seeming like a war crime and being one are quite different.

LOAC requires militaries to distinguish between — and only attack — military, not civilian, targets. Commanders are obliged to make a good-faith effort to take all feasible precautions to mitigate civilian risk.

These rules do not preclude unavoidable civilian casualties. It is a sad but undeniable reality of war that international law tolerates harm to civilians if it’s not deliberately inflicted, caused by indiscriminate attacks and avoidable with feasible precautions.

In our professional opinion, Israeli actions in Gaza reflected a consistent and good-faith commitment to respect and implement these LOAC principles.
As we've noted numerous times, modern wars involve messaging no less than munitions. The report shows that Israeli officials are almost resigned to the fact that the world will report unfairly anyway, but that doesn't mean they should give up improving how they get the truth across. The spokespeople should be involved nearly as much as the lawyers are in determining how to target and what information needs to be available instantly after an operation.





AddToAny

EoZ Book:"Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism"

Printfriendly

EoZTV Podcast

Podcast URL

Subscribe in podnovaSubscribe with FeedlyAdd to netvibes
addtomyyahoo4Subscribe with SubToMe

search eoz

comments

Speaking

translate

E-Book

For $18 donation








Sample Text

EoZ's Most Popular Posts in recent years

Hasbys!

Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

Donate!

Donate to fight for Israel!

Monthly subscription:
Payment options


One time donation:

subscribe via email

Follow EoZ on Twitter!

Interesting Blogs

Blog Archive