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UN Debate on Gaza Report: UN Watch to Lead
Response
Prominent Officers,
Experts, Heading to Geneva for Monday Session of
UNHRC
LIVE WEBCAST: MONDAY, JUNE 29, FROM 11:15 AM EST TO 1:00
PMwww.unwatch.org/gazaresponse
HEADING TO GENEVA: Maj-Gen.
Michael Jones, Lieutnant-Colonel Geoffrey S.
Corn, Col. Richard Kemp
GENEVA, June 25, 2015 - UN Watch will be
leading an international response to the UN's new
Gaza report in the plenary of the Human Rights Council, at a debate on
Monday under the 47-nation body's permanent agenda item targeting Israel.
The campaign to tell the truth about the war launched last summer
by Hamas will include appearances by prominent American, British and European
political and military figures at the UNHRC plenary, a press conference, and a
panel event for diplomats and human rights activists. Speeches will be posted on
our channel at YouTube.com/unwatch.
• Senior military
experts will present the findings of two fact-finding missions -- the
report of the JINSA Task
Force on the Gaza Conflict by five U.S. generals, and the preliminary
findings of the high-level international group of 11 military and political
figures -- both of which contrast sharply with the UN report. Watch their event
on live webcast at www.unwatch.org/gazaresponse on
Monday, June 29th, at 5:15 pm Geneva time (11:15 am EST to 1:00 pm
EST).
• A major new book by UN
Watch and NGO Monitor, Filling in the Blanks: Documenting Missing
Dimensions in UN and NGO Investigations of the Gaza Conflict, will be
released at the side event.
• Expert speakers will additionally include Dr. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies, who will analyze the funders of Hamas; and NGO Monitor
president Prof. Gerald Steinberg and Legal
Advisor Anne Herzberg, who will address
distortions of the report, and the problematic role played by groups like Human
Rights Watch, whose director Ken Roth actively supported Hamas during the war.
(See below his infamous "International Humanitarian Law allows" tweet
from August 19th, in defense of Hamas terror
tunnels.)
The report of the UN inquiry
-- headed for six months by William Schabas until he was forced to
resign over his undisclosed paid legal work for the PLO, and then by Mary
McGowan Davis, who in 2010 served on a similar committee to implement the
notorious Goldstone Report -- repeatedly equates Israel with Hamas, and insinuates that Israel's "political and military
leaders" are guilty of war crimes.
The UN report concludes with a thinly-veiled
call for members of Israel's "political and
military establishment, including at the senior level" to be investigated by the International Criminal Court; prosecuted by individual
countries that embrace universal jurisdiction; and for other countries to
"comply with extradition requests" pertaining to "suspects of such crimes" to be
sent to countries where they would "face a fair trial."
For
analysis of the UN report:
• One
of the most detailed
and damning comes from The Lawfare Blog, affiliated with the
Brookings Institution. Brookings senior fellow Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare associate editor Yishai Schwartz are clear: “The UN
Human Rights Council’s Independent Commission of Inquiry report on the 2014 Gaza
war, released Monday, is a bad piece of work—bad in almost entirely predictable
and boring ways, but no less bad for being bad and
predictable."
•
Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in
Afghanistan, who will be part of the UN Watch delegation, published a brilliant
op-ed in today's New York Times -- see
below.
The U.N.’s Gaza Report Is Flawed
and Dangerous
By RICHARD KEMP JUNE 25, 2015
LONDON — As a British officer who
had more than his share of fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans, it
pains me greatly to see words and actions from the United Nations that can only
provoke further violence and loss of life. The United Nations Human Rights
Council report on last summer’s conflict in Gaza, prepared by Judge Mary McGowan
Davis, and published on Monday, will do just that.
The report starts by attributing responsibility for the conflict to Israel’s “protracted occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” as well as the blockade of Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza 10 years ago. In 2007 it imposed a selective blockade only in response to attacks by Hamas and the import of munitions and military matériel from Iran. The conflict last summer, which began with a dramatic escalation in rocket attacks targeting Israeli civilians, was a continuation of Hamas’s war of aggression. In an unusual concession, the report suggests that Hamas may have been guilty of war crimes, but it still legitimizes Hamas’s rocket and tunnel attacks and even sympathizes with the geographical challenges in launching rockets at Israeli civilians: “Gaza’s small size and its population density make it particularly difficult for armed groups always to comply” with the requirement not to launch attacks from civilian areas. There is no such sympathy for Israel. Judge Davis accuses the Israel Defense Forces of “serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law.” Yet no evidence is put forward to substantiate these accusations. It is as though the drafters of the report believe that any civilian death in war must be illegal. Referring to cases in which Israeli attacks killed civilians in residential areas, Judge Davis says that in the absence of contrary information available to her commission, there are strong indications that the attacks were disproportionate, and therefore war crimes. But all we get is speculation and the presumption of guilt. The report is characterized by a lack of understanding of warfare. That is hardly surprising. Judge Davis admitted, when I testified before her in February, that the commission, though investigating a war, had no military expertise. Perhaps that is why no attempt has been made to judge Israeli military operations against the practices of other armies. Without such international benchmarks, the report’s findings are meaningless. The commission could have listened to Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said last November that the I.D.F. had taken extraordinary measures to try to limit civilian casualties. Or to a group of 11 senior military officers from seven nations, including the United States, Germany, Spain and Australia, who also investigated the Gaza conflict recently. I was a member of that group, and our report, made available to Judge Davis, said: “None of us is aware of any army that takes such extensive measures as did the I.D.F. last summer to protect the lives of the civilian population.” The report acknowledges that Israel took steps to warn of imminent attacks but suggests more should have been done to minimize civilian casualties. Yet it offers no opinion about what additional measures Israel could have taken. It even criticizes Israel for using harmless explosive devices — the “knock on the roof” — as a final warning to evacuate targeted buildings, suggesting that it created confusion. No other country uses roof-knocks, a munition developed by Israel as part of a series of I.D.F. warning procedures, including text messages, phone calls and leaflet drops, that are known to have saved many Palestinian lives. Judge Davis suggests that the I.D.F.’s use of air, tank and artillery fire in populated areas may constitute a war crime and recommends further international legal restrictions on their use. Yet these same systems were used extensively by American and British forces in similar circumstances in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are often vital in saving the lives of our own soldiers, and their curtailment would jeopardize military effectiveness while handing an advantage to our enemies. The I.D.F. is not perfect. In the heat of battle and under stress its commanders and soldiers undoubtedly made mistakes. Weapons malfunctioned, intelligence was sometimes wrong and, as with all armies, it has some bad soldiers. Unnecessary deaths resulted, and these should be investigated and the individuals brought to trial if criminal culpability is suspected. The reason so many civilians died in Gaza last summer was not Israeli tactics or policy. It was Hamas’s strategy. Hamas deliberately positioned its fighters and munitions in civilian areas, knowing that Israel would have no choice but to attack them and that civilian casualties would result. Unable to inflict existential harm on Israel by military means, Hamas sought to cause large numbers of casualties among its own people in order to bring international condemnation and unbearable diplomatic pressure against Israel. Judge Davis’s report is rife with contradictions. She acknowledges that Israeli military precautions saved lives, yet without foundation accuses “decision makers at the highest levels of the government of Israel” of a policy of deliberately killing civilians. Incredibly, she “regrets” that her commission was unable to verify the use of civilian buildings by “Palestinian armed groups,” yet elsewhere acknowledges Hamas’s widespread use of protected locations, including United Nations schools. Most worrying, Judge Davis claims to be “fully aware of the need for Israel to address its security concerns” while demanding that it “lift, immediately and unconditionally, the blockade on Gaza.” Along with the report’s endorsement of Hamas’s anti-Israel narrative, this dangerous recommendation would undoubtedly lead to further bloodshed in both Israel and Gaza.
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Labels: Conflict, Hamas, Human Rights Council, Hypocrisy, Israel, United Nations, UNWatch
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, June 25, 2015
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